Indigenous Plots in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema 3030939138, 9783030939137

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Indigenous Plots in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema Maria Chiara D’Argenio

Indigenous Plots in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema

Maria Chiara D’Argenio

Indigenous Plots in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema

Maria Chiara D’Argenio Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies University College London London, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-93913-7 ISBN 978-3-030-93914-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93914-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: Llorona by Daniel Hernández Salazar © 2018 Used with permission This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

Writing a book in the midst of the pandemic has been both a challenge and a privilege. The increased stress and workload, as well as the numerous school closures, have not made the writing process any easier but they are also reminders of how fortunate many of us are. I am extremely grateful to Jo Evans, Gareth Wood, Marga Navarrete, Macarena Jiménez Naranjo and Isabel Pérez Lamigueiro, who allowed flexibility in the management of my workload at UCL. I am also grateful to Claire Lindsay, for different kinds of support and many friendly chats, and to the staff of UCL library, for sending me the material I needed while the library was closed. Many thanks to David Wood, Catherine Boyle, Belén Vidal, Ana Elena González-Treviño, Elisa Sampson Vera Tudela, Karoline Pelikan, Jennifer Rushworth, Lorena Cervera Ferrer and Debbie Martin, for inviting me to deliver papers and/or introduce some of these or related films at seminars, public screenings and film clubs. Special thanks to Cynthia Vich and Sarah Barrow for convincing me to write about Wiñaypacha and for their comments on a previous version of one of the chapters, and to Miguel Fernández Labayen, for giving me the opportunity to think more about Indigenous filmmaking. I am extremely grateful to Charlotte Gleghorn, Fiorella Montero-Díaz, Isabel Seguí, Guadalupe Gerardi and Amanda Alfaro Córdoba, who shared their extensive knowledge through helpful conversations. Many thanks to the students of my cinema modules, and especially to the 2020–2021 cohort of the M.A. course in Race and Ethnicity in Contemporary Latin American Cinema, v

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who provided an excellent platform to share and test some of the arguments of this book. In Peru, I’m deeply indebted to my Peruvian family and, in particular, to Carlos Rebaza Uceda and Jaime Rebaza, as well as to Jorge Weisse. Thanks should also go to Luis Castañeda, Federico Cecchetti and Ciro Guerra for answering all my questions, and to Daniel Hernández Salazar, for allowing me to reproduce his photograph on the cover of this book. I would also like to extend my most sincere thanks to David Rojinsky, whose editing help has been invaluable and whose insightful comments have helped me clarify more than one point. At Palgrave, I would like to thank all those involved in making the book a reality and, in particular, Camille Davies and Naveen Dass. I am also grateful to Shaun Vigil, who supported my book proposal. My deepest gratitude to Teresa Maglione, who would have loved to have this book in her library of works written by women, and who has been a model of generosity and fight; this book is dedicated to her. I am equally deeply indebted to Paolo D’Argenio, for his continuous support over the years, not least during the pandemic. This book, as well as my many other projects, would not exist without the encouragement and unwavering support of Luis Rebaza Soraluz, who has read the whole manuscript, asked difficult questions, and helped me to refine some of the arguments presented here; most important, as an intellectual, he has been an infallible model of academic rigour, freedom and originality. Finally, two small big thanks go to Fabrizio and Arianna, who allowed the time to write even during our holidays, and who will love to see their names written here. None of this book’s text has appeared in the form it takes here. However, earlier versions of some sections were published in the following works (I thank the publishers for their permission to use these materials): ‘Wiñaypacha (2017) by Óscar Catacora: Overcoming Indigenismo Through Intimacy and Slowness’ in S. Barrow and C. Vich, Dynamic and Unstable Grounds: Peruvian Cinema in the TwentyFirst Century. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. ‘The Haunting Memories of La Llorona’ (Jayro Bustamante 2019). Mediático Blog (March 2021). ‘Decolonial Encounters in Ciro Guerra’s El abrazo de la serpiente: Indigeneity, Coevalness and Intercultural Dialogue’. Postcolonial Studies 21: 2 (2018).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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‘Monstrosity and War Memories in Latin American Post-conflict Cinema’. CINEJ Cinema Journal 1: 5 (2015). ‘A Contemporary Andean Type: the Representation of the Andean World in Claudia Llosa’s Films’. Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies 8: 1 (2013).

Contents

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1

Inter/cultural Films for Global Consumption

2

Holistic Cultural Criticism and the Social Life of Films: Madeinusa (2006) and La teta asustada (2009)

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Realist Modes of Production and the Politics of Memory: Ixcanul (2015) and La Llorona (2019)

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3 4 5 6 7 8

Human Rights Culture and the (Im)possibilities of Decoloniality: El abrazo de la serpiente (2015)

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Coloniality, Affect and Queering Gestures: Zona sur (2009)

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Necropolitics, Activism and Pedagogy: Terra vermelha (2008)

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Coevalness, Indigenous Modernity and Indigenization: El sueño del mara’akame (2016)

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The Power of Aesthetics: Retablo (2017), Wiñaypacha (2017), Canción sin nombre (2019)

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Index

273

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List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 3.1

Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 6.1

Fausta and her mother Perpetua in a still from La teta asustada The village of Manayaycuna preparing for the Tiempo Santo celebrations Magaly Solier and Tilda Swinton at the 59th Berlin Film festival award ceremony María Mercedes Coroy, María Telón and Jayro Bustamante at Ixcanul press conference during the 65th Berlin Film Festival María and Juana in a still from Ixcanul Alma (above), and an Ixil woman giving her statement at the trial (below) in two stills from La Llorona The young Karamakate in a still from El abrazo de la serpiente Karamate, Manduca and Theo in a still from El abrazo de la serpiente The old Karamakate and Evan in a still from El abrazo de la serpiente Wilson and Marcelina in a still from Zona sur Wilson, Marcelina and Andrés in the kitchen in a still from Zona sur Wilson in Carola’s bathroom in a still from Zona sur Nádio eating soil in a pivotal scene of Terra vermelha. Still from the film

36 48 74

88 95 104 128 138 150 167 172 178 209

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2

Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2 Fig. 8.3

The protagonists of Terra vermelha in a ritual in front of their tekoha in a still from the film Actor Ambrósio Vilhalva and director Marco Bechis at the 65th Venice Film Festival Wixárica extras during the shooting of El sueño del mara’akame Actors Antonio Parra Haka Temai and Luciano Batista Maxa Temai during the shooting of El sueño del mara’akame Segundo and his father Noé working at one of their creations. Still from Retablo Phaxsi and Willka in a still from Wiñaypacha Georgina during her daily commute in a still from Canción sin nombre

211 219 229

231 251 259 264

CHAPTER 1

Inter/cultural Films for Global Consumption

This book delineates a cinematic turn in recent Latin American filmmaking, which I call ‘Indigenous plots’. By this, I refer to inter/cultural feature films made by non-Indigenous directors (with the only exception of Óscar Catacora, who identified as Aymara)—in varying degrees of collaboration with Indigenous actors—which tell Indigenous stories, played by Indigenous actors and spoken in Indigenous languages, and are made for global (mostly non-Indigenous) consumption. The key terms that appear in the title of this book are intended to be descriptive. I use ‘plots’ because I focus on narrative fiction films with plots or diegesis centered on Indigenous characters. Yet the polyvalence of the noun ‘plot’ (especially its meanings linked to secrecy and plans) suits these films well and allows me to emphasize the agency of Indigenous actors who, in several cases, had specific agendas and objectives in taking part in these projects or developed them after their contribution as actors, and who, in most cases, played a key (albeit at times unrecognized) role in the elaboration of scripts and mise-en-scène. Regarding Latin American cinema, my use of this (contentious) notion does not seek to emphasize an ontological relationship between such a category and the films to which it might refer, but rather to underscore the fact that stakeholders, such as film festival organizers, employ the term as a way of ‘“packaging” and positioning […] films from Latin America’.1 A key point in my argument is that contemporary films with Indigenous plots should be studied within current global perspectives about ‘Latin © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. C. D’Argenio, Indigenous Plots in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93914-4_1

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America’ and ‘Latin American cinema’, especially those informing film festival choices. However, I also argue that films with Indigenous plots are entrenched in both global and local dynamics, and I examine how closely intertwined the two are. The films’ international recognition at A-list international film festivals such as Berlin, Cannes and Venice, for example, has impacted their reception at home at the box-office and, most relevantly to this study, in the domestic public sphere, while also facilitating the directors’ production of further films and related projects, as I discuss in Chapters 2 and 3. Thus, while I situate them in broad global perspective, I also locate them in specific local contexts with which the films engage. The term ‘inter/cultural’, which gives the title to this introductory chapter, needs some further clarification. In a sense, this word too has to be taken quite literally, as ‘relating to, pertaining to or taking place between two or more cultures’, as the dictionary says, or, as Laura Marks puts it in her study of intercultural cinema, ‘a context that cannot be confined to a single culture’.2 At the heart of each of the films I examine lies an encounter between non-Indigenous and Indigenous individuals, experiences, cultures, epistemologies and cosmogonies, but which are not all necessarily visible in every work. Some of the films portray fictional encounters and all of them set out to vindicate Indigenous cultures and denounce the marginalization of Indigenous populations. The type and implications of the encounters taking place on and off-screen, the ways in which non-Indigenous filmmakers screen the Indigenous experience, and the achievements and pitfalls of their engagements with indigeneity, are some of the concerns of this book. ‘Inter/cultural’ is useful also because it does not come with the semantic baggage of terms which might be equally valid such as heterogenous, multicultural or even indigenist; all notions that will be evoked or discussed in this book. In the Latin American context, Antonio Cornejo Polar’s concept of heterogeneity or the well-known notion of Indigenismo (which I will discuss in Chapters 2 and 8) would tie the films to a specific discursive, artistic and/or anthropological tradition which would conceal their multilayered complexity and their bond to the contemporary era. Multicultural, on the other hand, although used by Ella Shohat and Robert Stam in their seminal Unthinking Eurocentrism. Multiculturalism and the Media to ‘point[s] to a debate’3 and indicate a relational and radical polycentric anti-Eurocentric cinema, would be, nowadays, inevitably associated with problematic notions of acculturation

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from above, to the political Left’s idea of a ‘well-behaved “diversity”’4 or to official policies that homogenize the struggles of minoritized groups.5 Multiculturalism, as Carlos Iván Degregori and Pablo Sandoval write with regards to Peru, ‘emphasizes ideals of equity among groups and tolerance toward Others, more than the enrichment and mutual transformation that take place as a result of the interaction of differences’6 ; intercultural, instead, emphasizes relational processes, ‘locating the self in history and sorting out essentialisms, progressing from simple tolerance to the possibility of mutual enrichment among subjects who are increasingly connected through globalization’.7 This notion, however, is not without problematics. Whereas Marks finds that ‘it could suggest a politically neutral exchange between cultures’,8 in Latin America, interculturality and interculturalidad have precise meanings and political uses. Notions of interculturalidad have appeared in the 1970s in the field of bilingual education and have been subsequently used to address cultural diversity more broadly9 ; today they are employed by Indigenous organizations and are at the core of current decolonial debates. Robert Aman suggests we differentiate between interculturalidad (in Spanish) and interculturality (in English). As he explains, interculturalidad has been interpreted by such organizations as ‘respect for the diversity of Indigenous peoples […], but also as a demand for unity in order to transform the present structures of society as imposed by colonialism’.10 Interculturality, on the other hand, has dominated the discourses of cultural diversity proposed by supranational bodies such as the EU and UNESCO, which have made use of the term either as a tool to respond to the challenges brought about by multiculturalism, since it fosters unity ‘around universally shared values’ (UNESCO) or a method through which states can ‘promote social cohesion’.11 In contrast to this term, interculturalidad is a notion that comes from non-Western places and draws, on the one hand, on an understanding of culture as an ‘ideological position’ and, on the other, on a commitment to decolonization: ‘Where Indigenous movements target the colonially-imposed structure of society that has annulled and muted other languages and ways of being, the EU refers to interculturality as a political project’ and ‘identifies the conditions for interculturality in the cultural and linguistic heritage of the member states’.12 Considering this context, the ambiguity contained in the fact that the adjective ‘intercultural’ has the same spelling in English and Spanish embodies the conflicted nature of this type of cinema which this book

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embraces. Interculturalidad ‘allows different Indigenous cultures to view and interpret the world through the lens of their own beliefs in their own languages’13 however, the extent to which films with Indigenous plots achieve this should be questioned. In fact, if some of the films operate decolonial gestures (as I discuss, in particular, in Chapter 4), they are mostly constructed in Western sites of enunciation and epistemologies. Therefore, although the films incorporate elements of Indigenous knowledge; foreground on-screen Indigenous agency, and allow real Indigenous agency in their production, they do not necessarily engage in the ‘epistemic reconstitution’14 that defines decoloniality; that is, decoloniality understood as a radical project, which involves not only systems of representation but action and praxis. The graphic form ‘inter/cultural’, then, allows me to highlight such complexities and pose the relationship of the films with interculturalidad, interculturality, and indeed decoloniality, as a site of contention rather than a given. The idea behind Indigenous Plots in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema is both recent and old; related to both a long-standing individual intellectual interest and an observation of trends in the film cultures of the last two decades in what we call Latin America. I became interested in issues of representation of indigeneity more than a decade ago when I was researching fin de siècle and early twentieth-century Peruvian visual culture. While investigating the (in)disciplinary, exhibitionary and allegorical functions of visual types in photographs, engravings and painting, I found myself having conversations with friends and colleagues in Peru around contemporary cinematic depictions of indigeneity in what would become the ‘Madeinusa debate’. Working on expressive forms from a foundational period for hegemonic discourses of race and ethnicity in Peru provided me with a useful historicizing lens through which to consider contemporary non-Indigenous cinematic engagements with Quechua-speaking cultures. As I was also researching Peruvian indigenista films from the 1960s, I developed a ‘reticular’15 conceptual approach to the study of films, which makes disciplinary, spatial and temporal ‘connections’16 and locates the films in composite webs of past and present discursive and cultural traditions and forms, as well as social, ecological, and political concerns. This specific area of interest developed vis-à-vis a trend in the contemporary Latin American cinemascape, of (mostly) art-house transnational co-productions, often debut works of young filmmakers, which screen the Indigenous experience by combining the local and the global in

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a way that has proved appealing to international film festivals; this is demonstrated not least of all by their consistent nominations and awards at the major international festivals including Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Rotterdam, Sundance, Chicago, Lima, Havana, to name a few. The shared patterns of such films in terms of production, aesthetics, representation, and circulation, suggests a turn in Latin American contemporary cinema. Commentators have acknowledged this trend in academic articles and film reviews, but their studies have focused on individual films. Indigenous Plots in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema aims to identify, examine and explain such a cinematic turn and, by means of a select number of key case studies, to suggest ways to approach recent inter/cultural films which screen the Indigenous experience.17 The purpose of this endeavour is not just chronicling a phenomenon or, much less, categorizing films into well-defined boxes that suit academic taste. Rather, my objective is, first, to gauge the extent to which nonIndigenous films that set out to engage critically with colonial legacies and imaginaries, and with contemporary Indigenous marginalization, succeed in addressing these concerns and manage to ‘unthink’ as well as ‘un-do’ Western centrism and coloniality; second, I propose to make the case for a reticular and holistic cultural criticism which allows me to explain the cultural and political work the films do in specific historical contexts.

Films and Visual Economy Cinema, as Jacques Rancière, writes, is multiple things: ‘the material place where we go to be entertained […]; the residue of those presences that accumulates and settles in us as their reality fades and alters over time […] [and] an ideological apparatus producing images that circulate in society and in which society recognizes its modern stereotypes, its legends from the past and its imagined future’.18 Many others might be added: cinema is a social practice that can reinforce as well as challenge existing power imbalances within specific groups of people; it is an industry driven by capitalist modes of production and filmmaking is a form of labour; it can be the site of political activism and socio-political projects; film is a technology, an art form and a commercial product. Filmmaking involves, on the one hand, real negotiations between individuals, and between individuals and institutions, and, on the other, the symbolic construction of powerful imaginary possible worlds, where ‘meanings are created

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and contested’.19 Embracing the multilayered nature of cinema, Indigenous Plots in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema proposes an interdisciplinary analysis of filmmaking in the sense given to the term by Roland Barthes, that is, not as the arrangement of more than one discipline around a subject, but as the creation of ‘a new object which belongs to no one’.20 Such approach, which I call holistic, moves quite freely between disciplines and follows Marisol de La Cadena’s idea of thinking conceptually, rather than theoretically. Borrowing from visual culture studies, it considers films as complex and multifaceted audiovisual events, by which I refer not only to ‘the interaction of the [audio]visual sign, the technology that enables and sustain the sign, and the viewer’21 but also to the cultural, social and economic negotiations that enable the making of the film and to an understanding of films as interventions in the public sphere. Bearing this premise in mind, I apply Deborah Poole’s tripartite notion of a ‘visual economy’ to film. As she explains, a visual economy involves ‘an organization of production encompassing both the individuals and the technologies that produce images’; ‘the circulation of […] images and image-objects’; and ‘the cultural and discursive systems through which […] images are appraised, interpreted, and assigned historical, scientific, and aesthetic worth’.22 Adapting this scheme, I analyse the processes and effects involved in making, circulating, distributing and discussing films. In terms of the organization of production, I explore the negotiations taking place between individuals (and, to a lesser extent, institutions) involved in the production of the films. I draw on the growing corpus of studies of film production in the Latin American context (including those by Deborah Shaw, Sarah Barrow and Lúcia Nagib) in order to examine how modes of production might enact ethic-political agendas that ‘inflect’ and ‘improve’ reality23 ; in Chapter 8, I suggest that film production might be an experience of cultural intimacy that affects the cast and crew’s real lives as well as a site of political and/or affective alliances between non-Indigenous and Indigenous individuals in support of specific Indigenous plights, as I argue in Chapters 3 and 6. Regarding the circulation of films, I focus less on the shift occurred in the field of cinematic technology with the advent of the digital and more on the institutions and circuits where films are screened and debated, such as film festivals, local public spheres, and the very academia. Thus, I ponder the impact of screenings and speeches given at film festivals in terms of visibility of Indigenous issues while I engage with critical debates

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on film festival culture. My choice of foregrounding certain Indigenous gestures (such as Magaly Solier’s performance at the Berlinale or Eliane Juca da Silva’s intervention at Venice Film Festival, in Chapters 2 and 6, respectively) is political, but throughout the chapters I am careful to examine both the achievements and pitfalls of the films and the paratextual narratives crafted around them. I pay particular attention to academic and, even more, local debates generated by films, especially in the case of works that have triggered conflictive feelings and discourses of belonging, as well as debates around racism, such as Llosa’s, Guerra’s and Bustamante’s (analysed in Chapters 2, 3 and 4). Indigenous Plots in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema tackles inter/cultural films by non-Indigenous filmmakers as having a multiple ‘occupancy’ (adapting Thomas Elsaesser’s notion24 ), which is simultaneously and problematically local, national and global. For reasons mostly related to the precariousness of the national film industries, many of the films under scrutiny are transnational co-productions; moreover, several were made with the support of the same international schemes, including the US Sundance Lab, to develop screenplays, and initiatives targeting Latin American films such as the Cine en Construcción at the San Sebastián Film festival /Toulouse Latin American Film Festival, the Programa Ibermedia, the Hubert Bals Fund at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and the World Cinema Fund at the Berlin Film Festival (the latter two support not only Latin American but nonEuropean and non-US films more broadly). Compelling arguments have been advanced in recent years by scholars on the need to consider these funding contexts to evaluate whether collaborations of Global South and European or US countries are in fact new forms of neocolonial domination or are determining the development of recurrent aesthetics. Tamara Falicov, for example, has signalled that European funding schemes force filmmakers to ‘demonstrate “authenticity”’ thus treating ‘exoticism’ as a selling point.25 She has also alluded to a ‘globalized art-house film aesthetic’ promoted by funds such as the Cine en Construcción competition,26 while Randall Halle has warned that world cinema might indulge Western cinephiles with tales they want to hear.27 While I broadly agree with these arguments and consider the funding context as part of my examination of the films’ production history, I pay close attention to local cultural, social and historical dynamics. Indeed, as I have already mentioned, I argue that inter/cultural films with Indigenous plots, even when transnationally produced, cannot be fully understood without

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considering local issues, traditions and histories. Hence, I do not share Halle’s view that if a cinema ‘is transnational, it cannot be assessed within national parameters’.28 If, as the scholar maintains, ‘[s]tudies of “transnational” German, Japanese or Brazilian literatures or cinemas create for themselves a conundrum that cannot be properly studied within their own parameters’,29 then my aim in each chapter is to construct, as well as to disentangle, complex conundrums that elucidate the cultural impact of films. The issue of circulation overlaps with the third level of organization, which refers to the films’ worthiness or accrued value. Here, I am interested in both the representational content of films, that is, in Poole’s terms, their ‘use value’, as well as their ‘exchange’ value, which refers to the value (in other words, the historical, scientific, cultural and aesthetic meaning or importance) of films in relation not to the off-screen reality they depict, but to other images and representations that circulate as well as ‘the ways in which the fact of its circulation’30 connects the viewer to both the a-filmic reality and to the archive of already existing representations. Indigenous Plots in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema examines how films bring the real struggles of specific Indigenous groups to the screen (this is the object, for example, of Chapter 6, which focus on the Kaiowá-Guaraní’s struggles against land dispossession) as well as the political changes happening in the countries, such as the Bolivian proceso de cambio [process of change], analysed in Chapter 5. As Michelle H. Raheja claims in relation to Indigenous filmmaking, the on-screen existence of native subjects might be beneficial for Indigenous communities because it bestows ‘visibility’ on silenced voices and ‘flag[s] a broader offscreen reality’31 and the same can be said of films made by nonIndigenous filmmakers. However, I also analyse how the depictions of indigeneity relate to, conform to or challenge the archive of colonialist imaginaries that have ‘been essential to the imperial venture and to the formation of the new Latin American nations’ and which have situated the Indigenous and non-white ‘on the other side of the boundary that defined civilization, signifying both “otherness” and origins’.32 Chapters 2 and 4, in particular, analyse the tropes of colonialist discourse and imaginaries in the films of Llosa and Guerra. Although my focus in this book is not exclusively on representation, it does enjoy a certain prominence since, as Stuart Hall signalled long ago, regimes of representations are not superficial, they are ‘a critical exercise of power and normalisation’ and histories ‘have their real, material

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and symbolic effects’33 ; similarly, ‘[t]he image, the imagined, the imaginary’, are all elements of the imagination understood as ‘a social practice’ according to Arjun Appadurai.34 In today’s globalized culture, the imagination is ‘central to all forms of agency, is itself a social fact, and is the key component of the new global order’.35 As Raheja writes, films are representational practices that do not ‘mirror reality but can enact important cultural work as […] art form[s] with ties to the world of everyday practices and the imaginative sphere of the possible’.36 As I will argue in Chapters 2, 3 and 8, imaginative works like films can have ‘real’ impact in several ways, whether allowing Indigenous agency through the activist work of actresses (as in the case of Ayacuchan Quechua-speaking actress Magaly Solier or that of Pamela Mendoza, who belongs to a family who moved to Lima because of the internal war), which in turn can be an inspiring model for younger generations, or facilitating funding for social projects. As Gabriela Zamorano Villarreal argues in relation to Bolivian Indigenous media, films can be the site of ‘politics’: ‘the imaginative qualities of videos can contribute to the generation of political imaginaries and oppositional practices’,37 and I will investigate throughout the book whether this can also be said of films with Indigenous plots which, while not ‘activist’, still wish to create spaces for debate and, even at times for dissent, as I suggest in relation to the films analysed in Chapter 3. Acknowledging that imaging worlds is a step in their construction, Indigenous Plots in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema is interested in how film aesthetics convey meaning and, also, in the effects of specific film languages, from genre registers to screen formats and monochrome. Echoing the words of Gonzalo Aguilar, however, ‘what interests me here, rather than a formal analysis, is the type of preoccupations that [the films] reveal’,38 and the affective and cognitive effects of specific aesthetic choices in the viewer, as indeed the utilitaristic function they might have, such as bringing audiences to the cinematic theatres. As Jill Bennett reminds us borrowing from Gilles Deleuze, films address the viewer in ‘communicative’, and ‘transactive’ terms through affect,39 and I examine how these levels are played out in films that screen the Indigenous experience. Thus, I explore how affect is produced ‘within’ a work at the level of representation and what its function is: to represent, alongside haunting, the consequences of individual and collective trauma caused by political violence (in Chapters 2 and 3); to render upper classes’ anxieties regarding radical socio-political change and show that affect can exert as well as challenge dominant power (in Chapter 5); to

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configure alternative ways of apprehending reality via the child figure (in Chapters 5 and 6). I also examine how affect is produced ‘through’ a film by means of genre registers addressing the spectator’s emotions as in the case of ‘horror’, which I analyse in Chapter 3 as a strategy for attracting audiences. Regarding the viewer’s experience, I am particularly interested in the functioning of empathy and its association, and/or opposition, with critical enquiry. I also explore (in Chapters 2, 6, 7 and 8) empathy and affect at the level of modes of productions and argue that they might contribute to shape socio-ethical and political agendas shared by the Indigenous and non-Indigenous people involved in the making of the film. The ‘transactive’, though, coexists with the ‘communicative’ in some films; hence I also discuss more overt political and ‘pedagogical’ cinematic endeavours in Chapter 6.

Global and Local Flows Given its focus on the unsettling of colonialist imaginaries, epistemic hierarchies and Western Centrism by inter/cultural films, Indigenous Plots in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema dialogues more or less explicitly with studies such as Shohat and Stam’s already mentioned Unthinking Eurocentrism. Multiculturalism and the Media as well as more recent theorizations on coloniality/modernity/decoloniality.40 Shohat and Stam’s book was published in a period of ‘energetic debate about the interrelated issues of Eurocentrism, racism and multiculturalism’ following the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in what would become the Americas; a period in which, as they noted, Eurocentrism was still ‘[e]ndemic in present-day thought and education’ and ‘naturalised as “common sense”’.41 Thirty years on, we are at another critical conjuncture for debates on racism, cultural diversity and ethnocentrism, as demonstrated, on the one hand, by the global attention gained by the movement ‘Black Lives Matter’ after the killing of George Floyd and, on the other, by global initiatives of decolonization of Higher Education. George Floyd’s murder in 2020 by a US police officer kneeling on his neck was shared via social media and generated a wave of mobilizations and debates across the globe, including in Latin America, whereby ‘[p]eople not only protested in solidarity but were also empowered to share their own experiences of racism in their countries’.42 In Latin America, ‘newly energised responses built upon decades of activism’ took place in several countries denouncing the realities and long histories of

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racial inequality and discrimination often masked by discourses of cultural diversity or racial democracy and by the narrative of class inequality.43 In Brazil, BLM protest took place after the police killing of 14-year-old João Pedro Matos Pinto inside his family’s home in a favela in Rio de Janeiro; in Colombia, artists and activists drew attention to the beating to death of young Anderson Arboleda by the police; in Mexico, the hashtag #MexicoRacista was created to increase awareness of racist actions.44 On another level of the debate, discussions and implementation of decolonial pedagogies and praxis are no longer relegated to specific centres or fields of study; rather, they are taking place on a global level and across disciplines. In Latin America, teachers and scholars are criticizing the colonial and Eurocentric nature of today’s HE pedagogy and institutions45 and insisting on the need to adopt interculturalidad as a university policy to challenge epistemic neocolonialism.46 These debates and the creation of institutions that target Indigenous populations and aim to disseminate Indigenous cultures, knowledge and epistemologies such as the Universidad Nacional Intercultural de la Amazonía (UNIA), created in 1999 in Ucayali,47 Peru, the Universidad Ixil, founded in 2011 in Guatemala,48 or the Universidad Indígena Boliviana ‘Apiaguaiki Tupa’,49 are encouraging signs of change, as are indeed the decolonizing initiatives taking place in European countries (provided that they are not mere marketing strategies or ‘metaphors’50 that do not bring tangible changes). In fact, in the thirty years that have passed since the 1992 quincentenary, the social and political arena has changed dramatically. Indigenous socio-political activism has gained in strength, visibility through the articulation of Indigenous people’s rights has been enhanced and changes in constitutional reform and jurisprudence have been achieved.51 If 1993 was proclaimed the ‘International Year of the World’s Indigenous Peoples’ by the United Nations, in 2007, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was adopted by the General Assembly.52 Over the last two decades, the historical exclusion of Indigenous practices from nation-state institutions has been challenged by the appearance of ‘earth-beings in social protests’53 and by national politics as demonstrated specifically by the constitutions of Ecuador and Bolivia, which have defined those states as ‘plurinational’. Moreover, the new Ecuadorian constitution ratified by referendum in 2008 includes the chapter ‘Rights of Nature’ while the 2009 Bolivian Constitution recognized the Buen vivir as a ‘principle to guide state action’; in 2011 the Bolivian state

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also promulgated the Law of Mother Nature.54 As I write this introduction, Mapuche academic and activist Elisa Lancón has been elected to preside over the Constitutional Convention which will write a new constitution in Chile, news that certainly bring hope for change.55 The global circulation of the discourse and politics of indigeneity and the public presence of Indigenous intellectuals and university-trained Indigenous individuals, as De la Cadena states, have ‘successfully undermined evolutionary historicism’s authority to force a rethinking of the notion of indigeneity itself’.56 Since, as Jennifer Gómez Menjivar and Gloria Elizabeth Chacón note, ‘the first Zapatista emails from deep within the jungles of Chiapas, Mexico, circulated in cyberspace’57 the Indigenous presence has also been pervasive on the Internet. As a platform for visibilizing their struggle, the Indigenous use of such digital technologies has served to undermine the ‘denial of coevalness’ that, according to Johannes Fabian, has traditionally delineated anthropology’s ‘allochronic’ discourse as well as, more broadly, Eurocentric discourse.58 Of course, centuries-long power imbalances between Indigenous and non-Indigenous are far from being subverted both in the spheres of the real and the symbolic. Internal colonialism and racialized social systems are still prevalent in Latin America with Indigenous and other minoritized and racialized groups still facing inequalities, discrimination and marginalization at the level of citizenry rights, as will be discussed in the following chapters. The reality is thus that the models of citizenship which exist in many Latin American countries are contradictory at best. In Peru, for example, the Ministry of Culture aims to promote, manage and recognize the value of the country’s cultural and ethnic plurality; however, the lack of state policies in the field of education is engendering the survival of the Quechua language59 ; on the other hand, one of the dominant cultural policies of the neoliberal era, the nation branding campaign Marca Perú (to which I return in Chapter 2), proposes a models of citizenship based on a notion of equality in terms of consumerism and access to the (neoliberal) market.60 Indeed, the neoliberal marketization of cultural diversity is a global phenomenon that plays a role, I suggest, in the global consumption of films with Indigenous plots. The health, land possession, ways of knowing and lifestyles of Indigenous communities are particularly threatened by extractivism, which has become the dominant mode of production and development in Latin America and which I analyse in Chapter 6 in relation to the

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notion of necropolitcs and frontier-making. While the global mobilization demanding urgent action to tackle climate change should have brought the plight of Indigenous peoples centre stage, what has instead become evident is what Joan Martínez Alier has called ‘environmentalism of the poor’. This refers to inequality and the undemocratic nature of climate degradation which affects communities and populations differently depending on the systemic position of countries, power relations, as well as variables such as race, class or gender’, as María Villareal and Enara Echart Muñoz explain.61 Social and racial disparity has only been exacerbated by the Covid19 pandemic, which has hit Latin American countries and Indigenous populations living in Abyayala/Abya Yala particularly hard. In Rio de Janeiro, the first Covid-19-related death was that of Cleonice Gonçalves, a domestic worker who contracted the virus from her boss when the latter returned from Italy.62 In Latin America and beyond, the situation of domestic workers epitomizes the colonial root of current inequalities, as I discuss in Chapter 5. In March 2020, the Amazonian town of Iquitos in Peru was described as disaster zone as a result of the high death rates due to a lack of medical supplies. In the Indigenous territories in Brazil there have been more than 47,000 cases and 900 deaths. Sadly, one of the Indigenous victims of Covid-19 was Tiapuyama-Antonio Bolivar, the co-protagonist of El abrazo de la serpiente (examined in Chapter 4) who died in April 2020 in the Amazonian town of Leticia, in Colombia. In the cinematic realm, two crucial changes have happened in recent decades in Latin America which are relevant to this study. The first is the ‘“boom” in new cinema initiatives throughout the region’63 in the neoliberal era, of which the films analysed here are a part. More specifically, I refer to what Sophia McClennen has described as neoliberalism’s ‘uncanny effect on the culture industry, actually making it possible for a number of Latin American nations to develop some of their strongest film markets ever’.64 As McClennen explains, in ‘millennial globalization’ (namely, global economy based on neoliberal, market-oriented capitalism). Latin American states have entered market capitalism and worked ‘with multinational corporations to market “national” culture on a global scale’.65 As the scholar notes, the neoliberal global economy is not against diversification and actually seeks profit ‘from the desire for difference’ in line with an understanding of the homogeneity of globalization as ‘the rendering of all culture into commodity’.66 Such a phenomenon has

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altered the dynamics of the global mediascape and for the first time ‘a socially significant cinema has been successful in global markets, at home, and with awards’.67 Cynthia Vich and Sarah Barrow observe this trend in Peru, which, since the 1990s, has been shaped by neoliberal reforms that were ‘presented as a remedy for recovery after twenty years of conflict characterized by massive inflation and widespread political violence’.68 In such a neoliberal context, Peruvian cinema has seen an ‘outburst of productivity’ in terms of film productions which, nevertheless, coexists with an extremely precarious film infrastructure.69 The second change in the film cultures of the subcontinent has been the rise, particularly since the 1990s, of Indigenous filmmaking or video indígena which has created a variety of collaborative spaces for self-representation and activism. Such a rise was made possible by the advent of digital recording and the availability of new editing software and took place within a broader context of Indigenous mobilization which coincided with the development of discourses of cultural and collective rights.70 Building upon the legacy of Latin American political filmmaking of the 1960s (the so-called nuevo cine latinoamericano [New Latin American Cinema] movement) and thanks to the crucial role played by Coordinadora Latinoamericana del Cine y Video de los Pueblos Indígenas, CLACPI [Latin American Council of Indigenous Peoples’ Film and Communication], Indigenous filmmaking, as Charlotte Gleghorn maintains, has been challenging stereotypes and tropes of indigeneity, decolonizing the ‘Indigenous image’.71 Amalia Córdova explains that Indigenous media activism is ‘informed by decolonial struggle, and produces a joyous affect that is quite distinct from traditional militant cinema’72 ; however, as Córdova and Gleghorn point out, Indigenous directors struggle to get funding and support by film institutions which ‘favor auteurs with individually driven projects and academic or artistic credentials from formal institutions’.73 Problematically, then, non-Indigenous films with Indigenous plots might be ‘inadvertently, […] eclips[ing] Indigenous-authored productions from the region even as they present vital, and oftentimes allied, spaces to expand influence and debate’.74 Such instances of self-representation and self-determination are indeed crucial considering that Indigenous populations are underrepresented in Latin American mainstream media where racist stereotypes are still prevalent. For instance, with regard to the presence of Indigenous women on Peruvian Television, Aymara communication professional Yeny Páucar,

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who is a member of the Unión de Mujeres del Abya yala and of the Red de Comunicadores indígenas del Perú (REDCIP),75 explains that Indigenous women are invisibilized in the Peruvian media. Yet, when they are depicted, it is invariably in caricaturesque tones and according to racist types such as ‘the stupid woman’ or ‘the dirty woman’ instead of being represented as professionals, politicians and knowledgeable. Particularly violent portrayals are those of the TV programmes La paisana Jacinta or La chola Chabuca, in which Indigenous characters are played by ‘white’ male actors. Another telling example is the debate generated by the Oscars nomination of Yalitza Aparicio, the protagonist of Alfonso Cuarón’s global hit Roma (2018). Aparicio, a woman of Mixtec and Triqui origins from the Oaxaca region who had never acted before, was the first Indigenous woman to be nominated at the Oscars in the category of ‘Best actress’. Her nomination prompted racist commentaries by Mexican celebrity and telenovelas actor Sergio Goyri in a video that was shared via Instagram and generated a heated debate on domestic media. Aparicio also challenged the underrepresentation of Indigenous women in Mexican popular culture by appearing on the cover of Vogue Mexico in December 2018. Although arguably commodified for consumption, her Indigeneous identity did unsettle dominant values of Western beauty. Since Roma, Aparicio has openly supported the fight against discrimination, contributing to the 2019 International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples campaign and supporting the UN campaign I say no to racism! In 2019, she was named a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador. The actress has declared that: ‘Every step forward that I take, I carry with me a community that is not represented in the media. I am working hard to make sure that we are represented in the right way’.76 On a more global scale, important developments relevant to this study since the 1990s are the proliferation and growth of film festivals, their enthusiastic reception (and funding) of World Cinema, and the so-called ‘festivalisation’ of culture ‘in which festivals not only allow audiences to articulate (alternative) identities, but also accommodate a diverse range of (commodified) lifestyles’,77 as Marijke de Valck signals. Since the 1960s and 1970s, A-list festivals such as Venice and Cannes have shifted their orientation from national films to films produced all over the world, especially those made in non-Western countries and linked to activism and socio-political issues. Writing in 2017, de Valck pointed out that ‘In retrospect, there was a thin line between genuine interest in foreign cultures, openness to unfamiliar aesthetics and support for Indigenous

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struggles on the one hand, and—one could argue neocolonial—ambitions to map, frame and “discover” those cultures on the other’.78 In the 1990s, a further change occurred in film festivals as they began, on the one hand, to offer stronger support to film industries (particularly outside of Europe and USA) by means of funding schemes, training initiatives, talent scouting, and so on, and, on the other, to focus on attracting more audiences through, for example, the professionalization of outreach.79 Furthermore, ‘with the advent of globalisation and the increasing commodification of culture in the 1990s […] festival discourse progressively doubled as a branding tool’.80 In other words, film festivals have become platforms for the cultural and cinematic legitimization of films labelled ‘World Cinema’.81

Screening the Indigenous Experience The cinematic turn outlined in Indigenous Plots in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema started at the turn of the millennium with films such as Madeinusa (2006) by Peruvian filmmaker Claudia Llosa, and Hamaca Paraguaya (2006) by Paraguayan filmmaker Paz Encina. Llosa, a Barcelona-based filmmaker educated in Lima, New York and Madrid, developed the screenplay of Madeinusa at the Sundance Screenwriters lab in Los Angeles. The script was the recipient of the prize for the best original unpublished script at the Havana film festival; once finished, the film won the FIPRESCI prize at Rotterdam and the Special Jury prize at the Toulouse Latin American Film Festival, among others. In the same year of Madeinusa’s release, the film Hamaca paraguaya won the Un Certain Regard award at Cannes. Both Hamaca Paraguaya and Madeinusa were debut works of young Latin American women directors with plots centred on campesino and Indigenous characters who spoke real Indigenous languages (the Guarani and the Quechua languages, respectively). While Hamaca Paraguaya was played by professional actors, Madeinusa casted both professionals and non-professionals and saw the debut of Magaly Solier, a now famous actress and singer who is also an advocate for native languages and Indigenous women’s rights. Aesthetically, both films are art-house or art-cinema products, by which I mean films that ‘appeal[s] to the tastes of a specialized international audience, ha[ve] a commitment to high-quality production values, and display[s] a thematic translatability that crosses cultural frontiers’82 ; art-house films are not funded by big companies and target usually cultural elites and

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not the mainstream audiences addressed by commercial cinema. In terms of production, they were both co-produced with European companies83 with the Spanish Wanda Visión featured in the list of production companies of both films. Hamaca paraguaya was ‘recognized as the “before and after” marker par excellence’84 of Paraguayan cinema and the same could be argued of Llosa’s films (especially of La teta asustada). Eva Romero points out that Encina’s film showed young directors that a Paraguayan film could be ‘“successful” on a world stage’,85 words that are echoed by those of Peruvian filmmaker Melina León (the first Peruvian woman director to be nominated at Cannes) in relation to the impact of Claudia Llosa’s global success, although León emphasizes that, unlike herself, Llosa came from the socio-cultural elite. Since the release of Madeinusa and Hamaca paraguaya, a consistent number of art-house Latin American films, made in different regions and produced with local capital and, often, festival funding schemes or transnational coproduction deals, have crafted Indigenous plots and miseen-scènes and foregrounded the Indigenous languages spoken in the subcontinent. Films such as Terra vermelha (2008) by Argentine-Italian Marco Bechis, La teta asustada (2009) by Llosa, Zona sur (2009) and Yvy Maraey. Tierra sin mal (2013) by Bolivian Juan Carlos Valdivia, Los viajes del viento (2009) and El abrazo de la serpiente (2015), by Colombian Ciro Guerra, Pájaros de verano (2018), by Guerra and Cristina Gallego, Xingú (2011), by Brazilian Cao Hamburger, Ixcanul (2015) and La Llorona (2019), by Guatemalan Jayro Bustamante, El sueño del mara’akame (2016), by Mexican Federico Cecchetti, Guaraní (2016), by Argentine Luis Zorraquín, Retablo (2017), by Peruvian Álvaro Delgado-Aparicio, Wiñaypacha (2017), by Peruvian Óscar Catacora, Zama (2017), by Argentine Lucrecia Martel, Canción sin nombre (2019), by Peruvian Melina León, Roma (2018), by Mexican Alfonso Cuarón, Xquipi’ Guie’dani/El ombligo de Guie’dani (2019), by Catalan/Mexican Xavi Sala, the recent La memoria del monte (2021), by Encina, are some of the most well known. This book examines a selected number of them, combining films that are well known in academic circles with others that have received scant attention. These films have gained recognition at major international films festivals on both sides of the Atlantic (and beyond) and some of them have been selected by national film commissions for global competitions such as the US Oscars; a few of the films have also impacted domestic touristic and branding campaigns focusing on cultural diversity (as I explain in

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Chapters 2 and 3). Despite their more or less problematic dealings with indigeneity, they have certainly bestowed visibility upon Indigenous populations and struggles, and generated important debates in their home countries on ethnicity, national belonging, memory and socio-racial marginalization, as well as on cinema. Films like Madeinusa and La teta asustada, Ixcanul , and Roma, have also launched the careers of young Indigenous actresses such as Aparicio, Solier and María Mercedes Coroy, who, as mentioned above, have done important activist work to fight discrimination and bring real change in the cultural domain (as I explain in Chapters 2 and 3). This new cinematic turn places Indigenous actors, stories and languages centre stage instead of relegating them to the background and secondary roles; spectatorial identification is now often directed towards them. As Gisela Cánepa Koch states in relation to Peruvian cinema, the presence of Indigenous subjects in fiction films contributes to a visual economy that ‘des-documentalice’ [inhibits the documentarian gaze on] the Andean world86 ; moreover, those Indigenous plots that focus on contemporaneity contribute more strongly to unsettling the mythical and idealizing allure of indigeneity, and unlinking indigeneity from past and stasis. As I will examine in each of the chapters, inter/cultural films with Indigenous plots are informed by partnerships with Indigenous actors and communities, who have contributed to crucial filmic decisions informing the creation of the mise-en-scène and the scripts. For example, Solier suggested shooting Retablo in Quechua; previously, her singing qualities had determined the presence of songs in Madeinusa and La teta asustada. In Terra vermelha, Ambrosio Vilhalva would regularly suggest changes to the dialogues in both Spanish and Guarani as well as to the arrangement of the setting; the dialogues of El sueño del mara’akame were rewritten drawing on Antonio Parra’s translations into the Wixárica language. My aim, however, is not to romanticize such collaborations or cinematic representations of indigeneity. Thus, while I discuss these and other important achievements of each film, I am especially interested in the conflictive and conflicting areas, in the ambivalent coexistences of conformity and challenge. As I shall demonstrate in the following chapters, filmmakers can at the same time visibilize Indigenous trauma and conform to cultural voyeurism and colonialist tropes; screen the exotic and challenge exoticization via production strategies; undermine their decolonial gestures by means of paratextual narratives and human rights discourse; display Indigenous agency but restrict it to

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filmic representation; exert political activism via conventional aesthetics and narrative structures. Hence, throughout Indigenous Plots in TwentyFirst Century Latin American Cinema, I argue that inter/cultural films with Indigenous plots require holistic readings that examine films from the pre-production to their ‘afterlife’. I also argue that the films of the cinematic turn I am tracing relate to aesthetics and politics (and the combination of the two) in a way different from key filmic traditions such as the New Latin American Cinema or Third Cinema, both crucial points of reference for the screening of the lives of marginalized and subalternized groups in Latin America, which I discuss in more detail in Chapter 6. While scholars of Indigenous filmmaking have suggested a genealogy that sees present-day Indigenous media activism as a continuation of 1960–1970s Third Cinema, I would suggest that, with the exception of Bechis’s film, contemporary inter/cultural films with Indigenous plots are somewhat distinct from those cinematic militant projects. In this respect, I share McClennen’s view that contemporary Latin American Cinema should be examined according to new critical paradigms and not those applied to twentiethcentury revolutionary filmmaking. For McClennen, contemporary films are to be located in the context of millennial globalization and the global film industry. The latter, as Ignacio Sánchez Prado puts it, ‘has effectively commoditized both “Second Cinema” and “Third Cinema” into a single continuum of cultural capital’87 and profits from the current widespread desire for difference. The contemporary Latin American film industry is characterized by a more ambiguous relationship with neoliberalism, the blurring of the opposition between commercial viability and aesthetics, and a new conception of politics. McClennen posits that in ‘contrast to the anticommercial practices of the 1960s and 1970s filmmakers, there is a new generation of filmmakers that is both aesthetically innovative and commercially successful’,88 a situation mirrored by the films under scrutiny in Indigenous Plots in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema, which do not aim at niche markets. Some of them (Roma, Wiñaypacha and Canción sin nombre, for example) have even used new distribution companies such as Netflix and Amazon, which have obviously enlarged their audience outside Latin America. In terms of aesthetics, their innovative languages move away from experimentalism and do not seek to unsettle the spectators’ comfort zone. The films combine mainstream codes and structures—including ‘classic tales

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of discovery, challenge, and personal growth’89 and even genre register (for example, in La Llorona)—with original filmic languages. This does not mean that the films are apolitical but rather that, as scholars have argued in relation to other contemporary films, filmmakers are approaching politics in a way that differs from the praxis of militancy and activism of the past. Indeed, the question of what kind of political work these films do lies at the heart of Indigenous Plots in TwentyFirst Century Latin American Cinema and, in a way, serves as a line of inquiry for the entire study. My exploration of the issue is informed by studies that have sought to expand the notion of ‘the political’ in cinema and art beyond militancy. In his study of New Argentine Cinema, Aguilar highlights that recent cinema is not led by identity and political imperatives, by the question of ‘who we are’ and ‘what we should do’90 ; drawing on Deleuze, he notes that formal cinema is not guilty of political escapism and the matter is ‘not what film does with a political that is exterior to it but how the political offers itself up to us in the form of these movies’.91 On the other hand, in a book on affect and emotions in Latin American cinema, Laura Podalsky argues that there is political potential in the ways films ‘touch us’.92 Likewise, in her analysis of the post-millennial Latin American film industry, McClennen suggests that ‘[w]hile the commercial style of these films often softens, perhaps even whitewashes, their political edge, it would be a mistake to miss the very real ways that these films have opened up public dialogue on major social issues’.93 However, the inter/cultural films with Indigenous plots discussed in this book both exemplify and challenge these arguments. For example, while most of these films are not overtly ‘political’ in the traditional sense of revolutionary filmic form and content, some of them, like Bechis’s Terra vermelha, address explicitly the question of ‘what we should do’, in his case in relation to Kaiowá-Guaraní ecocide in Brazil. The identity question, on the other hand, is present in films such as Madeinusa, La teta asustada, Zona sur, El abrazo de la serpiente, which aim (albeit, in some respects, problematically) to present images of pluricultural and plurilingual nations characterized by racialization and inequality. More specifically, my interrogation of the ‘political work’ of films draws on Mieke Bal’s theorization of contemporary non-representational art. In order to address how art can be politically relevant without being activist, Bal proposes, on the one hand, to replace politics with ‘the political’ and, on the other hand, to replace activism with activation. She

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draws on Chantal Mouffe’s notion that politics is the set of institutions and practices whereby social order is created and conflict is resolved, or stopped, and that ‘the political’ is, instead, a ‘dimension of antagonism’ which characterizes human societies. For Bal, art ‘intervenes’ in the political not only via activism or propaganda, but by means of what she calls ‘activation’, namely, the combination of criticality and solidarity which ‘activate us into more and deeper thinking’.94 Bal’s notion affords clear correspondences with other contemporary reflections, such as those usefully summarized by Frank Möller. As Möller states, ‘Art is political if it complicates, not simplifies, and if it “extends the thread of recognition and understanding beyond what previously was seen and known”’.95 Art is political also if it ‘reinterprets “what previously was seen and known” so that alternative understandings may emerge’.96 Informed by such a notion of art and cinema’s political potential as well as by Deborah Shaw’s methodological preference for a focus on a series of individual cases over the drawing of generalizing conclusions,97 Indigenous Plots in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema seeks to analyse the kind of ‘interventions’ made by inter/cultural films, the critical reflection they enact, as well as the impact, if any, such films might have. Even as each chapter deals, by means of close scrutiny of the filmmakers’ projects, with specific critical concerns that are expressed in a respective chapter’s title, Indigenous Plots in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema as a whole endeavours to offer a hopefully useful map of problems and a template for discussing these films in a holistic, interdisciplinary and reticular fashion.

Notes 1. Marvin D’Lugo, Ana López and Laura Podalsky, eds., The Routledge Companion to Latin American Cinema (Abingdon-onThames, Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2018), 5. 2. Laura Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 6. 3. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (New York: Routledge, 1994), 47. 4. Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism, 46. 5. Marks, The Skin of the Film, 7.

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6. Carlos Iván Degregori and Pablo Sandoval, ‘Peru: From Otherness to Shared Diversity,’ in A Companion to Latin American Anthropology, ed. Deborah Poole (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), 164. 7. Degregori and Sandoval, ‘Peru: From Otherness,’ 164. 8. Marks, The Skin of the Film, 7. 9. Degregori and Sandoval, ‘Peru: From Otherness.’ 10. Robert Aman, ‘Why Interculturalidad Is Not Interculturality: Colonial Remains and Paradoxes in Translation Between Indigenous Social Movements and Supranational Bodies,’ Cultural Studies 29, No. 2 (2015), 207. 11. Aman, ‘Why Interculturalidad,’ 207. 12. Aman, ‘Why Interculturalidad,’ 208. 13. Aman, ‘Why Interculturalidad,’ 216. 14. Mignolo explains that ‘Decoloniality means first to delink (to detach) from that overall structure of knowledge in order to engage in an epistemic reconstitution. Reconstitution of what? Of ways of thinking, languages, ways of life and being in the world that the rhetoric of modernity disavowed and the logic of coloniality implement. The failure of decolonization during the Cold War was due, mainly, to the fact that the decolonization did not question the terms of the conversation, that is, did not question the structures of knowledge and subject formation (desires, beliefs, expectations) that were implanted in the colonies by the former colonizers’. Walter Mignolo, ‘Interview—Walter Mignolo/Part 2: Key Concepts,’ E-International Relations [online] January 21, 2017, available at https://www.e-ir.info/pdf/67501. 15. I take this notion from Luis Rebaza-Soraluz. See Rebaza-Soraluz, De ultramodernidades y sus contemporáneos (Lima: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2019), 22. 16. Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism, 5. 17. The selection of the case studies aims by no means to be exhaustive and responds to two main criteria: representativeness and range of problematics explored. The films chosen belong to different regions of Latin America and different film industries and cultures, which encompass some of the biggest and oldest industries of the subcontinent (Mexico, Brazil) and some of the most precarious ones

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(Guatemala, Peru). They deal with different Indigenous populations (Andean Quechua-speaking, Andean Aymara-speaking, Kaqchikel and Ixil, Amazonian, Wixárica/Huichol, GuaraníKaiowá); languages (Quechua, Aymara, Amazonian languages, Maya-Kaqchikel, Guarani, Wixárika); modes of knowing; and epistemologies. The films engage with a range of issues affecting those Indigenous populations, such as discrimination and contemporary processes of racialization; the legacy of colonization, internal colonialism and neo-colonialism; extractivism; ecocide; internal armed conflicts; resistance; human rights; citizenry rights; representation and visibilization. Importantly, they allow a discussion of some of the key problematics at stake in cinema’s engagement with indigeneity, which are examined in the chapters and include the reformulation of colonialist imaginaries and discourse; exoticism and stereotypes; anti-colonialism and decoloniality; eurocentrism; interculturality and interculturalidad; activism; human rights culture; memory; affect; Indigeneization of media; cinematic representation; the relationship between modes of production and Indigenous agency; the role of film festivals and funding schemes; neoliberalism and globalization). Each chapter offers a ‘long reading’ of specific films and projects in relation to the above issues while the chapter titles indicate the main critical concerns addressed in each section. As I write at the end of this introduction, considered as a whole, the chapters endeavour to offer a map of inherent problems and even a template for discussing inter/cultural films with Indigenous. 18. Jacques Rancière, The Intervals of Cinema (Brooklyn: Verso, 2014), 5–6. 19. Nicholas Mirzoeff, An Introduction to Visual Culture (London and NY: Routledge, 1999), 6. 20. Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans. R. Howard (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989), 72. 21. Mirzoeff, An Introduction, 13. 22. Deborah Poole, Vision, Race and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 9–10. 23. Lúcia Nagib, Realist Cinema as World Cinema: Non-Cinema, Intermedial Passages, Total Cinema (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020), 23.

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24. Thomas Elsaesser, European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005). 25. Tamara L. Falicov, ‘Film Funding Opportunities for Latin American Filmmakers,’ in A Companion to Latin American Cinema, eds. María Delgado, Stephen Hart and Randal Johnson (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017), 88. See this chapter also for a useful overview of film funding schemes available to Latin American filmmakers. 26. Falicov, ‘“Cine en Construcción”/“Films in Progress”: How Spanish and Latin American Filmmakers Negotiate the Construction of a Globalized Art-House Aesthetic,’ Transnational Cinemas 4, No. 2 (2013), 253–271. See also Minerva Campos, ‘La América Latina de “Cine en Construcción”. Implicaciones del apoyo económico de los festivales internacionales,’ Archivos de la Filmoteca 71 (2013), 13–26. 27. Randall Halle, ‘Offering Tales They Want to Hear: Transnational European Film Funding as Neo-Orientalism,’ in Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories, eds. Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover (NY: Oxford University Press, 2010), 303–319. 28. Randall Halle, The Europeanization of Cinema: Interzones and Imaginative Communities (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 183. 29. Halle, The Europeanization, 183. 30. Poole, Vision, Race, 11. 31. Michelle H. Raheja, Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty and Representations of Native Americans in Film (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), xiii. 32. Jean Franco, ‘High-tech Primitivism: The Representation of Tribal Societies in Feature Films,’ in Mediating Two Worlds: Cinematic Encounters in the Americas, eds. J. King, A. M. López and M. Alvarado (London: BFI Publishing, 1993), 81. 33. Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation,’ Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, No. 36 (1989), 71. 34. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 31. 35. Appadurai, Modernity, 31. 36. Raheja, Reservation Reelism, xiii.

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37. Gabriela Zamorano Villarreal, Indigenous Media and Political Imaginaries in Contemporary Bolivia (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2017), 1. 38. Gonzalo Aguilar, New Argentine Film: Other Worlds (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 35. 39. See Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision. Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 7. 40. See, in particular, the work of Anibal Quijano, Walter Mignolo, Nelson Maldonado-Torres. 41. Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism, 1. 42. Inés Pousadela, ‘#BLM Beyond the US: Anti-Racist Struggles in Latin America,’ Uploaded May 26, 2021, 12.00 a.m., https:// www.opendemocracy.net/en/democraciaabierta/blm-beyondthe-us-anti-racist-struggles-in-latin-america/. 43. Bruno Carvalho, ‘Latin America Is Ready for Its Black Lives Matter Reckoning,’ uploaded June 29, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/ 2020/06/29/opinion/latin-america-racism-police.html. 44. Alexandra Anton Mahfoud, Ashley Brown, Dara Dawson, Dennis Espejo, Sofia Jacalone, Stephanie Jiménez, Isabel Morales and Abby Neiser, ‘Black Lives Matter: A Panorama of the Movement Across Latin America and the Caribbean,’ Panoramas: Scholarly Platform [online] c. 2020, available at https://www.panora mas.pitt.edu/news-and-politics/black-lives-matter-panorama-mov ement-across-latin-america-and-caribbean. 45. Carlos Interiano, ‘¿Descolonización de la universidad? (I),’ Diario de Centro América [online] March 29, 2019, available at https://dca.gob.gt/noticias-guatemala-diario-centro-ame rica/testimonial/descolonizacion-de-la-universidad-i/. 46. Martín E. Díaz, ‘Universidad, eurocentrismo y neocolonialismo epistémico: Reflexiones para una descolonización de la universidad nuestroamericana,’ Pacarina del Sur 38 [online], No. 10 (January–March 2019), available at http://pacarinadelsur.com/ home/amautas-y-horizontes/1704-universidad-eurocentrismo-yneocolonialismo-epistemico-reflexiones-para-una-descolonizacionde-la-universidad-nuestroamericana. 47. ‘Descolonización de la educación superior universitaria intercultural en el Perú,’ Centro Amazónico de Antropología y Aplicación Práctica [online] August 27, 2019, available at https://www.caaap.org.pe/2015/08/27/descolonizacion-de-la-

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educacion-superior-universitaria-intercultural-en-el-peru/. There are in fact other three intercultural universities in Peru. See Universidades interculturales y regiones que se quedarán sin universidades—Vicerrectorado Académico—PUCP. 48. Giovanni Batz, ‘La Universidad Ixil y la Descolonización del Conocimiento,’ Maya América 3, No. 1 (2001), https://digita lcommons.kennesaw.edu/mayaamerica/vol3/iss1/9/. 49. In 2008, the Bolivian Government approved the creation of three Indigenous universities in Bolivia: the Universidad Quechua ‘Casimiro Huanca’, the Universidad Aymara ‘Túpak Katari’ and the Universidad Guaraní y de Pueblos de Tierras Bajas ‘Apiaguaiki Tüpa’. In Ecuador, the Universidad Intercultural de las Nacionalidades y Pueblos Indígenas Amawtay Wasi was created in 2018. Chilean government has recently promulgated a policy to promote the incorporation of Indigenous peoples, cultures and languages in the university. 50. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, ‘Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,’ Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, No. 1 (2012), 1. 51. Helen Gilbert and Charlotte Gleghorn, eds., Recasting Commodity and Spectacle in the Indigenous Americas (London: Institute for Advanced Study, 2014), 4. 52. Arturo Arias, ‘Foreword: Indigenous Subjects and the Mastering of Sciences,’ in Indigenous Interfaces: Spaces, Technology, and Social Networks in Mexico and Central America, eds., Jennifer Gómez Menjivar and Gloria Elizabeth Chacón (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2019), xxii. On The United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, see also Freya Schiwy, Indianizing Film: Decolonization, the Andes and the Question of Technology (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 217–219. 53. Marisol de la Cadena, ‘Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections beyond “Politics”,’ Cultural Anthropology, 25, No. 2 (2010), 336. 54. ‘Buen Vivir: The Rights of Nature in Bolivia and Ecuador,’ Rapid Transit Alliance [online] December 2, 2018, available at https://www.rapidtransition.org/stories/the-rights-of-nat ure-in-bolivia-and-ecuador/. 55. In one of the 17 seats reserved to native members.

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56. Marisol de la Cadena and Orin Starn, eds., Indigenous Experience Today (Oxford and NY: Berg, 2007), 3. 57. Gómez Menjivar, ‘Chacón,’ Indigenous Interfaces, 3. 58. See Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 59. Ioanna Gallo, ‘Hay que fomentar la diversidad cultural y no desaparecerla’ [online] May 21, 2015, available at https://udep. edu.pe/hoy/2015/05/hay-que-fomentar-la-diversidad-cultural-yno-pretender-desaparecerla/. 60. Gisela Cánepa Koch and Félix Lossio Chávez, eds., La nación celebrada: marca país y ciudadanías en disputa (Lima: Fondo Editorial Universidad del Pacífico, 2019). 61. María Villareal and Enara Echart Muñoz, ‘Luchas, resistencias y alternativas al extractivismo en América Latina y Caribe,’ openDemocracy [online] February 6, 2020, available at https:// www.opendemocracy.net/en/democraciaabierta/luchas-resistenc ias-y-alternativas-al-extractivismo-en-am%C3%A9rica-latina-y-car ibe-en/. 62. Rachel Randall, ‘Domestic Workers and COVID-19: Brazil’s Legacy of Slavery Lives on’ [online] October 27, 2020, available at https://migration.bristol.ac.uk/2020/10/27/domesticworkers-and-covid-19-brazils-legacy-of-slavery-lives-on/. 63. D’Lugo, ‘López and Podalsky,’ The Routledge Companion, 2. 64. Sophia McClennen, Globalization and Latin American Cinema: Toward a New Critical Paradigm (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), vii–viii. 65. McClennen, Globalization, 4. 66. McClennen, Globalization, 4. 67. McClennen, Globalization, viii. 68. Cinthya Vich and Sarah Barrow, eds., Peruvian Cinema of the Twenty-First Century: Dynamic and Unstable Grounds (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 6. 69. Vich and Barrow, Peruvian Cinema, 7. 70. Charlotte Gleghorn, ‘Indigenous Filmmaking in Latin America,’ in A Companion to Latin American Cinema, eds. María Delgado, Stephen Hart and Randal Johnson (Hoboken, NJ: John Wylie & Sons, 2017), 167–169. 71. Gleghorn, ‘Indigenous Filmmaking,’ 167.

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72. Amalia Córdova, ‘Indigenous Video, Transnational Networks, and Indigenous Festivals,’ in The Routledge Companion to Latin American Cinema, eds. D’Lugo, López and Podalsky (Abingdon-onThames, Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2018), 206. 73. Córdova, ‘Indigenous Video,’ 208. 74. Charlotte Gleghorn, ‘Filmic Disciples and Indigenous Knowledges: The Pedagogical Imperative in El abrazo de la serpiente (Ciro Guerra, 2015),’ Diálogo 23, No. 1 (Spring 2020), 32. Indigenousauthored films and inter/cultural films usually circulate through different circuits. In terms of festivals, for example, there are important differences between Indigenous and mainstream film festivals. While mainstream film festivals facilitate filmmakers’ and producers’ access to film industry contacts, bring films to global audiences, and promote their visibility and prestige in line with an auteurist notion of cinema, Indigenous film festivals aims to build networks of solidarity and focus on human rights and socio-political issues that are relevant to Indigenous communities. Furthermore, as María Paz Peirano notes, ‘Indigenous communities do not necessarily agree with the political economies of mainstream film festivals [which are], linked to the commodification of films and filmmakers according to a logic based on the accumulation of individual prestige’ (‘Ethnographic and Indigenous Film Festivals’, p. 84). It should also be noted that some of the programme choices of mainstream festivals’ sidebars are problematic. For example, in the recent World Fund Cinema Day focusing on ‘Decolonising Cinema’, which was organized virtually in March 2021 as part of the Berlinale, the panel on decolonizing cinema in Latin America featured renowned scholars of Indigenous filmmakers (such as Amalia Córdova) and non-Indigenous filmmakers, but no Indigenous filmmakers, a paradox which was promptly noted by the very participants. As Amalia Córdova writes, ‘The traditional circulation spaces of national, regional (“Latin American”) and “world” cinema are culturally unprepared to negotiate with the communitybased practices prevalent in Indigenous film and video, which carry distinct social concerns and commitments. In fact, mainstream film festivals and distributors can occasionally become new “contact zones”, where marginalization is re-inscribed or tokenism takes the place of thoughtful engagement.’ See Córdova, ‘Towards an Indigenous Film Festival Circuit,’ in Film Festivals and Activism,

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eds. Dina Iordanova and Leshu Torchin (Glasgow: St. Andrews Film Studies, 2012), 75. Inter/cultural films are aimed primarily at non-Indigenous audiences and non-Indigenous film festivals as demonstrated by the festivals where they premiered. Some inter/cultural films made by non-Indigenous filmmakers (including some of those under scrutiny in this book) have also circulated in Indigenous film festivals that screen films made by both Indigenous and non Indigenous directors or in sidebars at mainstream festivals devoted to Indigenous filmmaking. Examples are El sueño del mara’akame, Wiñaypacha, Hamaca paruaguaya and Yvy Maraey.Tierra sin mal. Even Madeinusa was included in the 2015 edition of NATIVeA Journey into Indigenous Cinema, a sidebar at the Berlinale, although its inclusion has been rightly defined as controversial by some scholars. The circulation of inter/cultural films at Indigenous filmmakers is an important aspect of what I call the films’ ‘afterlife’ and certainly merits further study. Given the crucial differences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous film festivals and because of the need for a specific type of ethnographic analysis, such issues are not discussed in detail in this book. Important studies have been produced in recent years on Indigenous Film festivals. See, for example: Amalia Córdova, ‘Towards an Indigenous Film Festival Circuit,’; Kristin Dowell, ‘Indigenous Media Gone Global: Strengthening Indigenous Identity On and Off-screen at the First Nations/First Features Film Showcase,’ American Anthropologist 108, No. 2 (2006), 376–384; María Paz Peirano, ‘NATIV e—A Journey into Indigenous Cinema at the 65th Berlin International Film Festival, 5–15 February 2015: Focus Latin America,’ Visual Anthropology Review 1, No. 32 (2016), 91–93; María Paz Peirano, ‘Ethnographic and Indigenous Film Festivals in Latin America: Constructing Networks of Film Circulation,’ in Film Festivals and Anthropology, eds. Aída Vallejo and María Paz Peirano (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017), 73–87; Sebastián Gómez Ruiz and Gabriel Izard Martínez, ‘Indigeneidad performada: Apuntes etnográficos de dos festivales de cine indígena en Colombia y Panamá,’ Revista Española de Antropología Americana 50 (2020), 265–276. 75. CONCORTV, ‘Las mujeres indígenas todavía estamos inivisibilizadas en los medios de comunicación,’ uploaded September 5,

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2020, http://www.concortv.gob.pe/noticias/las-mujeres-indige nas-todavia-estamos-invisibilizadas-en-los-medios-de-comunicac ion/. 76. Christi Carras. ‘¿Cuál será el próximo papel importante de la estrella de “Roma” Yalitza Aparicio? Conductora de los Grammy Latinos,’ Los Angeles Times [online] November 12, 2020, available at https://www.latimes.com/espanol/entretenimiento/articulo/ 2020-11-12/la-actriz-nominada-al-oscar-roma-yalitza-aparicio. 77. Marijke de Valck, ‘Screening World Cinema at Film Festivals,’ in The Routledge Companion to World Cinema, eds. Rob Stone, Paul Cooke, Stephanie Dennison and Alex Marlow-Mann (Routledge, 2017, ebook), 396. 78. de Valck, ‘Screening World Cinema at Film Festivals,’ 395. 79. de Valck, ‘Screening World Cinema at Film Festivals,’ 396. 80. de Valck, ‘Screening World Cinema at Film Festivals,’ 396. 81. ‘[Film festivals] not only screen World Cinema, they select, intervene and frame. The most powerful business festivals act as “sites of passage” […] through which the flows of World Cinema move in search for cultural legitimization’ (de Valck, ‘Screening World Cinema at Film Festivals,’ 397). Along the same lines, in her analysis of the funding schemes associated to film festivals, Falicov writes: ‘The significance of these grants, though quite small in most cases, is that they provide a stamp of approval for the filmmaker to obtain additional funding; they also potentially open the door to screen the film in the festival for which they received funding […]. Often, winning one competition, such as a script-development grant from one film festival, will enable the filmmaker to obtain another grant, creating a “snowball effect” which is not uncommon’. Falicov, ‘Film Funding Opportunities,’ 87. Some scholars have even alluded to the development of a ‘Latin American Festival Cinema’, which, according to Minerva Campos, ‘broadly materializes and manifests itself in some homogeneous topics, aesthetics, and narratives.’ See Campos, ‘Film (Co) Production in Latin America and European Festivals. The Cases of Production Companies Fabula & Control Z,’ Zeitschrift für Kulturmanagement Journal of Cultural Management 1 (2015), 103. 82. Vich and Barrow, Peruvian Cinema.

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83. Hamaca Paraguaya was coproduced by Arte France Cinéma, the German Black Forest Films, the Danish Fortuna Films, the Argentine Lisa Stantic Producciones, the Paraguayan Silencio Cine, the French Slot Machine, the Spanish Wanda Visión. Madeinusa, by the Spanish Oberón Cinematográfica and Wanda Visión, and the Peruvian Vela Producciones. 84. Eva K., Romero, ‘Hamaca Paraguaya (2006): Temporal Resistance and Its Impossibility,’ Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 16 (2012), 312. 85. Romero, Hamaca Paraguaya, 312. 86. Gisela Cánepa-Koch, ‘Discriminación y ficción en Madeinusa,’ October 28, 2006, available at http://www.gira.org.pe/PDF/ madeinusa.pdf. 87. quoted in McClennen, 8. 88. McClennen, Globalization, 26. 89. McClennen, Globalization, 60–61. 90. Aguilar, New Argentine Film, 25. 91. Aguilar, New Argentine Film, 126. 92. Laura Podalsky, The Politics of Affect and Emotion in Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and Mexico (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 7. 93. Podalsky, The Politics of Affect, 6. 94. Mieke Bal, ‘How Can Art Do Political Work.’ Conference at UCL in February 2019. 95. Frank Möller, ‘Politics and Art,’ in Oxford Handbooks Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 2. 96. Möller, ‘Politics,’ 2. 97. Deborah Shaw, ‘European Co-production Funds and Latin American Cinema: Processes of Othering and Bourgeois Cinephilia in Claudia Llosa’s La teta asustada,’ Diogenes 62, No. 1 (October 2016), 97.

CHAPTER 2

Holistic Cultural Criticism and the Social Life of Films: Madeinusa (2006) and La teta asustada (2009)

In February 2009, at the award ceremony of the 59th Berlinale, a jury led by the Scottish actress Tilda Swinton proclaimed La teta asustada the winner of the prestigious Golden Bear. The manner in which the recipients then accepted the award is germane to this study as a whole since each one of them invoked patterns of identification relating to belonging, indigeneity and film production that appear in the other Latin American productions analysed in later chapters. Claudia Llosa, a Peruvian-born Barcelona-based filmmaker, dedicated the prize to Peru, ‘to our country’; Magaly Solier, an Ayacuchan Quechua-speaking actress spoke in her native language, delivering a powerful un-translated short speech directed at the Peruvian Quechua-speaking population watching from home, and afterwards performed a song she herself had authored in Quechua; the Spanish producers Antonio Chavarrías and José María Morales thanked the funding bodies of the film, among them the Berlinale’s own World Cinema Fund.1 The prestigious international recognition of a Peruvian film and Solier’s performance in her native language received an extraordinary amount of coverage in the Peruvian press. The enthusiastic acclaim mirrored the dedication to the nation Llosa articulated in the award ceremony. In fact, despite the predominance of Spanish funding bodies in the film’s production, headlines such as ‘The Berlin bear roared in Quechua’, and ‘Love for Peru (in the form of a Golden bear)’,2 underscore that La © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. C. D’Argenio, Indigenous Plots in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93914-4_2

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teta asustada was perceived locally as a very national product because of its local casting, narrative and mise-en-scène. Released in Peru in April of the same year, the film did very well in terms of the box-office; a year later, in February 2010, it was selected for the Academy Awards, becoming the first Peruvian film to reach the final nominations. Despite the celebrations, however, and echoing what had happened three years earlier in response to Llosa’s debut work Madeinusa (2006), a heated debate over the film’s representation of the Indigenous subjects ensued among film critics and scholars both in Peru and in the international academic community. While many praised the film’s aesthetic qualities and the global visibility granted to Andean Quechua-speakers, to women victims of political violence, and, indeed, to Peruvian cinema itself, others criticized the film for its exoticization of Indigenous communities and its re-enacting of problematic binaries of racialization, which some saw as a consequence of its transnational and ‘tailor-made-for-the-film festival-circuit’ appeal. Some of the issues inherent to the debate were clearly reflected in each of the recipient’s actions during the award ceremony at the Berlinale: the film’s relationship with the national; the collaboration between a nonIndigenous director and an Indigenous actress; the visibility granted to the Quechua language and Quechua-speakers; the film’s transnational mobility and funding. In what follows, I aim to explore these issues through a discussion of La teta asustada’s achievements as well as its more critical features by engaging with the most notable scholarly work produced in the last decade and by situating the film within, on the one hand, Peruvian cultural history and, on the other, Eurocentric discourses that have crafted the non-West for the West. Moreover, since one of the key points in my discussion is that the achievements of La teta asustada are inseparable from its shortcomings, I aim to explain the dynamics involved in both. Another key point is that La teta asustada needs to be interpreted in relation to Madeinusa in order to unravel the roots and patterns of the representations of indigeneity in both films. I argue that only a holistic cultural criticism which considers the production, representation and ‘social life’ of these films, enables us to examine their significant yet problematic cultural and political work. Since its release, critical commentary on La teta asustada has stressed three main lines of enquiry: the film has been seen as a work about war trauma and female victimhood; as a film about Peru’s Indigenous population and Lima’s migrant culture; and as a transnational co-production which merges the local with the global. Given that the first line of enquiry

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distinguishes the diegesis of La teta asustada from that of Madeinusa, I first consider this distinct thematic strand before examining how both works engage the Andean world in a similar fashion.

Memory Work La teta asustada tells the story of Fausta (played by Magaly Solier), an Andean girl who has moved to the capital Lima with her mother Perpetua (Bárbara Lazón), after being forcibly displaced by Peru’s recent internal war. They live with the family of Fausta’s uncle Lúcido (Marino Ballón) in one of the highly populated shantytowns surrounding the city. The film opens with a black screen and the sound of an older female voice singing in Quechua while the subtitles translating the lyrics appear on the black screen revealing to the non-Quechua speaker a narrative of violence and pain told by a mother to her child3 ; the absence of images serves to focus the spectator’s gaze on the words of the song. A medium close-up of an elderly woman’s face, centre-stage, singing, then appears on screen. She is singing the story of her husband’s assassination and of her rape when pregnant. Off-screen, a young female voice sings back to her, also in Quechua; it is her daughter. Slowly her head enters the still frame, gradually moving closer to her mother’s. The two women embark upon a dialogue in song: ‘Every time you remember, you stain your bed with tears of sorrow and sweat’, the daughter sings while combing the mother’s hair. These lines introduce the sorrow and memory which, we discover, inhabit the two women’s voices, silences and bodies. The film cuts to the room’s glassless window and the initial intimacy acquires a more social texture. The window reveals the deserted landscape of the hills that border Lima (Fig. 2.1). The film was shot in Manchay, a town located south-east of the capital, in the Pachacamac district, which in the 1980s became populated by Andean migrants displaced by the internal war. The two women are hence Andean Indigenous immigrants living in the socio-economic and cultural margins of the capital. The actual plot begins after this opening sequence, with the death of Perpetua. In order to make money to take her mother to her home village in the countryside and bury her according to their traditions, Fausta finds a job as a domestic servant in the house of the wealthy Aída (Susi Sánchez). This drastic change in her life will force Fausta to confront a condition that makes her fear men and the external world. Fausta suffers from la teta asustada, literally ‘the frightened breast’, which

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Fig. 2.1 Fausta and her mother Perpetua in a still from La teta asustada

in the film is an illness that, according to Andean popular belief, affects those children born to and breastfed by women who suffered traumas during the internal armed conflict. Fausta’s mother was one of many women raped during the 1980s internal war between the self-proclaimed Peruvian Communist Party Sendero Luminoso [Shining Path] and government forces. Fausta’s fear of being a victim of rape, as her mother was, led her to place a potato into her vagina. Aída, a rich white pianist suffering a creative crisis, is fascinated by Fausta’s songs and convinces the girl to sing for her in exchange for a pearl for each song. Their relationship turns into one of a binary dynamic between domineering mistress and dominated servant: not only does Aída mistreat Fausta without acknowledging her as a subject, but she also steals one of Fausta’s original melodies. Nevertheless, it is in Aída’s house that Fausta finds someone who helps her to eventually overcome her inherited fear: Noé (Efraín Solís), a Quechuaspeaking gardener who shares her culture and values. In the end, Fausta decides to have the potato extracted, thus ‘liberating’ herself. Llosa’s use of the notion of la teta asustada comes from anthropologist Kimberly Theidon’s study Intimate Enemies: Violence and Reconciliation

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in Peru, originally published in Spanish in 2004 and then in English translation in 2013. The book, which inspired the plot of the film, is the result of Theidon’s ethnographic study of post-conflict reconstruction in the Ayacucho department, where she had observed the ways in which ‘people reconstruct individual lives and collective existence in the aftermath of war’ once ‘the killings have stopped and former enemies are left living side by side’.4 The term la teta asustada is Theidon’s own translation of the Quechua expression mancharisqa ñuñu, which refers to a ‘sophisticated theory regarding the transmission of suffering and sustofrom mother to child, either in the utero [sic] or via the mother’s breast-milk’.5 Theidon explains that ‘Ñuñu can mean both breast and milk depending on the context and the suffix, and mancharisqa refers to susto or fear’.6 The expression la teta asustada ‘conveys how strong negative emotions and memories can alter the body and how a mother can transmit these harmful emotions to her baby. Quechua speakers insist the frightened breast can damage a baby, leaving the child slow-witted or predisposed to epilepsy’.7 Theidon collected testimonies given by women who experienced traumatic events (extreme fear) while pregnant, whose children are referred to as ‘children of the massacre’.8 Llosa re-elaborates the already limited translation into Spanish of a Quechua term, adapting the narrative derived from the expression mancharisqa ñuñu through the character of the dying mother Perpetua, who was raped while pregnant, and also through Fausta since she had absorbed her mother’s fear as a foetus and as a suckling child. Although not central to the plot, the country’s twenty-year internal conflict constitutes the backdrop of the film’s diegesis. It is the unspoken motivation behind Fausta and her mother’s migration to Lima, and the declared cause of Fausta’s illness, as made evident by Perpetua’s initial sang story. The internal war began in 1980 and is considered to have ended in 2000, under the government of Alberto Fujimori, with the arrest of Abimael Guzmán, Sendero Luminoso’s leader. The vast majority of the nearly 70,000 victims of the war were Quechua-speakers from Andean rural areas. The most devastated region of the country was the Department of Ayacucho, where Solier’s hometown Huanta is located. After Fujimori fled the country in 2000, amid scandals of corruption and human rights abuses, the interim president, Valentín Paniagua, established a Peruvian Truth Commission in order to investigate the roots of the conflict and to offer recommendations to the government on transitional justice. This initial commission, later renamed the Peruvian Truth

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and Reconciliation Commission [hereafter PTRC] by the elected president Alejandro Toledo, produced a final report after an inquiry lasting two years (2001–2003). As well as these investigations, the PTRC also commissioned a visual narrative aimed at producing a shared memory of the conflict: the transmedia photographic project Yuyanapaq (a Quechua word meaning ‘to remember’) which is on permanent exhibition at the Museo de la Nación in Lima until 2026. Since the early 2000s, the memory of the conflict has been a constant theme in the public sphere as well as in contemporary cultural production. The PTRC report and the Yuyanapaq exhibition were key elements in opening up the debate and fostering artistic engagement for they ‘provided both framework and motivation for the visual arts to engage with the topic’.9 Llosa’s film has been interpreted by many commentators as a work that participated in precisely that endeavour. Alexandra Hibbett sees La teta asustada as part of what she calls, borrowing from Gabriel Salazar Borja, ‘duty-memory’ cinema; that is, films that stem from the works of the PTRC, the Yuyanapaq exhibition and the broadcasting of victims’ testimonies. In that sense, memory is understood as a political and ethical imperative which can be articulated through film in the form of a ‘collective memory process seen as vital in preventing the repetition of violence’.10 Likewise, Cánepa Koch claims that La teta asustada should be read as ‘a form of cultural representation and public deliberation and intervention on themes such as political violence, memory and ethnic and gender identities in Peru’.11 Scholars have provided valuable analyses of La teta asustada’s dealings with the memory of the internal war, whether in terms of foregrounding women’s traumatic experience, exposing post-conflict life or engaging with the processes of remembering and forgetting. Carolina Rueda and Douglas J. Weatherford posit that Llosa’s film is an intensification and a continuation, respectively, of Theidon’s work and the PTRC report. For Rueda, Llosa has produced a ‘visual document’ which ‘intensified’ the testimonies presented by Theidon and the information included in the multi-authored book Reconociendo otros saberes: Salud mental comunitaria, justicia y reparación [Recognizing other knowledges: Community Mental Health, Justice and Reparation] and in the PTRC report.12 According to Weatherford, Llosa’s story addresses ‘whether reconciliation is possible for […] all of Peru’.13 A similar argument is put forward by Rebeca Maseda, who argues that ‘Llosa makes a decisive pro-Indigenous move in denouncing the traumas, and the lack of citizenship rights

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suffered during and after the Peruvian “Internal Armed Conflict”’.14 For Adriana Rojas, on the other hand, the film furthers the works of the PTRC since it ‘portrays not only trauma but also redefines life after catastrophe’.15 That said, there have also been discordant voices, which have expressed less favourable views about the film’s engagement with the war and its memorialization: for example, critics have highlighted the absence of explicit references to the conflict in favour of themes concerned with Peruvian identity (Shaw), the displacement of the memory discourse through a ‘utopic narrative of [socio/economic] success’ based on the logic of consumerism (Vich), and the lack of an analytical approach to the war (Lillo) as well as the ambivalent notion of reconciliation articulated in the film’s ending.16 Reading the presence of the war in La teta asustada vis-à-vis Theidon’s study might shed light on the kind of intervention made by Llosa’s film in the Peruvian public debate on political violence and memory mentioned by Hibbett and Cánepa Koch. Hence, it could be argued that La teta asustada focuses on signalling women’s trauma, as it is expressed in emotion (fear), song and the body, with the latter understood ontologically as site from which our existence is experienced. By means of Fausta’s somatic nose-bleeding whereby ‘the hazardous anguish of internal trauma become evident’,17 La teta asustada, like Theidon’s testimonies, renders the idea that the body ‘does not represent what it performs, it does not memorize the past, it enacts the past, bringing it back to life’.18 The presence of songs, on the other hand, attests to the importance of collective singing in Andean culture and hence, a cultural element already explored in Madeinusa. In La teta asustada, the songs performed in Quechua—most of which were written by Llosa and translated by Solier, who also composed the music—are a means of expression and healing, thus reproducing the function of songs examined by Theidon. In particular, the film seems to draw on the qarawi: that is, according again to Theidon, a narrative form and a way of ‘historicizing events while they are unfolding’ which is ‘sung during important collective events by widows, who compose the lyrics on the spot and take turns in singing’19 ; although significantly in this film, as is the case in Madeinusa, singing as a communal form of expression becomes a solitary activity. La teta asustada elaborates further on the significance of songs by assigning them a narrative function both in relation to the diegesis and the characters’ trauma: songs

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explain elements of the plot and they also, in the case of Perpetua, narrativize the trauma. The film presents songs, therefore, as repositories of collective memory whereby ‘collective remembered values’ and experiences are transmitted and conserved.20 For Rojas, songs also allow female agency since Perpetua switches from ‘victim to observer as she retells the experience’ and Fausta finds in songs a medium ‘to put to rest the haunting bequest’.21 For Maseda, the song enables Llosa to eschew the spectacularization of both trauma and victimhood: ‘[b]y using alternative devices instead of clear depictions (visual representations) of the events that caused the trauma, Llosa is denouncing the abuses without rendering them a morbid spectacle, and its victims, objects to be looked at’.22 Similarly, when viewed through the lens of Theidon’s study, Llosa’s film, like the latter, also tells a story of female victims of political and sexual violence. Foregrounding the experiences of women victims of rape, even if only in the realm of the symbolic, is a significant gesture in Peru, since sexual violence is a theme ‘foreign to the Peruvian imaginary’.23 Although the PTRC report defined sexual violence during the conflict as a human right violation rather than ‘collateral damage’ and provided a record of the sexual abuses while recommending that the State put in place a system of reparations for the victims, the abusers have not in reality been held to account.24 In 2015, Denegri and Esparza claimed that twelve years on from the PTRC report, ‘there has been no single sentence for cases of sexual violence during the war’.25 Furthermore, the film’s use of Theidon’s conceptualization of la teta asustada trope invites us to think about memory and trauma in intergenerational terms, simultaneously within and beyond Marianne Hirsch’s well-known notion of ‘postmemory’, that is, ‘the relationship that the “generation after” bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before’.26 In line with the functioning of postmemory, the memory of the rape and the susto experienced by Perpetua is transmitted to Fausta through ‘stories, images, and behaviours’,27 specifically, through songs and the potato anti-rape device; however, the non-Western conception of a trauma transmissible via the uterus and maternal milk exceeds Hirsch’s notion. Moreover, following the theory of la teta asustada, not only does Fausta inherit the memory of the trauma, but she ‘experiences’ the very trauma as a foetus, which inhibits the usefulness of Hirsch’s notion in explaining her relation to past traumas that inhabit both the mother’s and the child’s body.

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Finally, the film’s ‘adaptation’ of Theidon’s testimonies of Andean women’s own theorizations of their trauma enables Llosa to represent victims in a way that does not exclude agency. According to Hibbett, ever since the PTRC report was published, the notion of victim has been the axis of a moral economy that has informed memory discourse in Peru and this is something that has been mirrored in cultural production.28 As the scholar has explained, the category of victimhood configured by the PTRC was designed to foreground the historically excluded Quechuaspeaking Peruvian population, and thus to generate empathy among an urban public in Lima. At the same time, the intention was to counter the heroic narratives of Shining Path while fostering a discourse of transitional justice. Even so, the victim trope remains problematic; for Hibbett, there is the risk, for instance, of viewing victims paternalistically as innocent or passive subjects, and, for that same reason, of depoliticizing both memory discourse and the complex socio-ethnic fabric of the country. In Peruvian cultural production, further complexity derives from the fact that while the near totality of the victims was from rural areas, the authors of the texts and films telling their stories have been mostly from Lima, hence reproducing the indigenista paradox which I will explain in more detail in the following pages. On the other hand, scholars have identified ways in which cultural production might manage to portray victims in ways that overcome these limitations. In relation to Peru, Hibbett argues that some works have complicated the notion of victimhood by, for example, focusing on categories hitherto scarcely represented such as women or soldiers’ children or, more interestingly, allowing the victim to address and unsettle the spectator through both words and gaze.29 The focus on women victims in La teta asustada would therefore be one such case, although, as I shall go on to demonstrate, the film’s notion of victimhood is certainly not unproblematic. The film’s engagement with the memory of the conflict is therefore significant for different reasons: because of its participation in a debate about political violence and war trauma or, as the director herself declared, for ‘put[ting] the question out there’; because of its reconfiguration of victimhood via its focus on women, transgenerational trauma and, to a certain extent, on the victims’ agency and strategies of resistance; because it links trauma to cultural difference by means of, not only of casting and characterization, but also non-Western beliefs (mancharisqa ñuñu) and means of expression (song). It is important to point out that most of these elements result from the adaptation of Theidon’s study. Nevertheless, the

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film’s ‘memory work’ is also limited in both cultural and political terms; in fact, ‘[e]xplicit political discourses do not come into play’ in the film.30 Consequently, while it might be argued that the film’s intervention in the public sphere is itself ‘political’ since it ‘contribut[es] via art, to a postconflict process of social healing, opening dialogue, overcoming conflict and national integration’31 and perhaps, as Ann Kaplan and Ban Wang put it, ‘open[s] up a space for transformation of the viewer’ through ‘intercultural compassion and understanding’,32 it might equally be argued that the film’s search for empathy and Llosa’s ‘posing the question out there’ do not allow her to foster critical reflection on matters such as political violence and reparation. However, I would suggest that the real shortcoming of this film is that it undermines its political potential in relation to memory discourse through its questionable approach to what appears to be the central theme of the film: indigeneity. Indeed, given the discussion thus far, one might suppose that the central theme of the film’s narrative and mise-enscène is the trauma of war, even though it actually occupies a peripheral, background role. While some commentators see this marginalization as a metaphor for the real historical silencing of the victims, I would tend more towards the suggestion that the thematic kernel of the film is instead identity politics and the complex heterogeneous socio-ethnic fabric of Peruvian society; not least of all because this latter reading is consonant with the numerous declarations of the filmmaker. The way the film approaches its central theme is quite controversial, as I shall demonstrate in the rest of this chapter, and can be fully appreciated only through a reading of La teta asustada alongside Llosa’s debut work, Madeinusa. In that same respect, it is worth noting that Hibbett’s notion of ‘blockage’ seems to allude precisely to what we might call the ‘containing’ effect of the film’s focus on indigeneity. Rather than in terms of blockages, though, which imply a lack of agency, I would pose the question in terms of discourses, ideologies and political visions mobilized via cinematic representation. As Rancière puts it, ‘The problem is not one of knowing if one can or should represent, but of knowing what one wishes to represent and what mode of representation should be chosen to that end’.33 In what follows, I analyse the patterns, strategies and roots of the representation of Andean Quechua culture in both La teta asustada and Madeinusa with a view to unravelling the discourses, ideologies and power relations inherent to the image of the Andean world they convey.

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Notwithstanding the important achievements of La teta asustada in relation to women’s war trauma and the memory of the conflict and those of both La teta asustada and Madeinusa in relation to Andean visibility, I argue that the films ‘compromise’ such achievements. The more prominent narrative of indigeneity obfuscates the questions of trauma and memory by reinforcing, rather than challenging, a colonial discourse of asymmetrical cultural difference between the West and the non-West. Ultimately, therefore, the films construct an image of Peru which is, on the one hand, defined by essentialized dualities and, on the other, by the reduction of complex cultural alterity to familiar categories of difference.

Madeinusa When she made La teta asustada, Llosa was not new to dealing with Quechua-speaking people as the subjects of a film. Her directorial debut Madeinusa, released in 2006, was a film about the traditions of a fictional isolated village in the Peruvian Andes and its encounter with the modernity brought by the lifestyle and values associated with Lima. Madeinusa was shot in Canrey Chico, in the department of Ancash, which is well known for touristic destinations such as the Huascarán National Park and the Cordillera Blanca; most of the cast consisted of non-professional actors from the local area. Like La teta asustada, the film won several prizes both in Europe and the Americas, and the script won a prize for best original script at the Havana Film Festival in 2003 even before the film itself was made. After Llosa then attended the Sundance Screenwriters Lab in the United States, the film was produced by primarily Spanish companies even though it was also the recipient of the Berlinale’s World Fund and eventually received a little funding from the Peruvian National Film Board Conacine [Consejo Nacional de la Cinematografía], ‘who thereby rubberstamped it as a “national” project’.34 Once finalized, it was awarded prizes at the Hamburg, Rotterdam and Mar del Plata film festivals; in the Lima Film Festival, it received the Conacine award and was the runner-up for Best First Work; it was also nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance where it premiered in 2006. The film provoked controversy when it opened in Peru, however. The issue centered on the ways in which the film represents Indigenous people within Peruvian society: if many film reviews welcomed the cinematic centrality of Quechua-speaking people, many others criticized the film’s approach to Andean culture, which was labelled as ‘touristic’, ‘external’

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and even ‘racist’. Juan José Beteta, for example, praised the audiovisual quality of the film and what he called (problematically, I might add) its anthropological realism35 ; likewise, Gonzalo Benavente applauded the centrality of Andean culture, the film’s realism and its subtle camerawork. Jon Beasley-Murray read the film in terms of ‘subalternity and (the failures of) hegemony’ arguing that it ‘both displays and enacts […] a betrayal of precisely such well-intentioned efforts on the part of the coastal elite to hegemonize the subaltern interior’36 ; a view shared by Diana Palaversich for whom Llosa manipulates preconceived and Eurocentric notions regarding the West and the non-West, thereby doing postcolonial and feminist work37 ; similarly, Marie-Eve Monette posited that while the film depicts the Peruvian Andes ‘as a sublime landscape uncontaminated by modernity and filled with magical and religious experiences’ for the international audience, it also undermines ‘the image of the Andean region as mythical, timeless and primitive by incorporating the Indigenous voice and perspective regarding modernity’.38 At the other end of the spectrum, the film was defined as a ‘cinematic insult’, a racist work and an orientalist exoticization by Pilar Roca, Wilfredo Ardito and Víctor Vich, respectively.39 Mónica Delgado seemed to pinpoint the problem in her review of the film when she stated that the film uses Western themes and imagery, offers an external gaze on the Indigenous world, and asserts the impossibility of a reconciliation between the ‘Andean’ and the ‘non-Andean’.40 The debate surrounding the film was especially apparent in academic criticism and commentary. According to Juli A. Kroll, for instance, the film presents examples of incomplete modernity and ‘images of cultural alterity that have characterized Western perspectives on Andean indigeneity’, although she also highlighted the character’s female empowerment at representational level.41 According to Iliana Pagán-Teitelbaum, Llosa’s representation shares patterns with what Gretchen Bataille and Charles Silet call the ‘instant Indian’ of Hollywood films, an ideal figure that synthesizes the characteristics of different North American Indigenous cultures.42 Juan Carlos Ubilluz Raygada discussed the film in relation to the report on the Uchurraccay case suggesting that the film, like the report, reproduces criollo anthropological knowledge on the Andean world, without questioning it and, hence, depriving the Andean inhabitants of ‘their conditions as subjects’.43 Such a heated debate spanning more than a decade within and beyond Peru shows that the Andean world is a problematic subject

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for Peruvian society, and indeed, for the scholars working on it; nevertheless, I am not convinced that the controversy is merely local and that it should therefore be explained, as Beasley-Murray proposed, in terms of internal tensions between the coast and the highlands. Instead, I would suggest that the controversy is related to the ways in which Madeinusa and La teta asustada articulate well-established Eurocentric discourses at both a national and international level which thus produce a simplified, easily accessible and marketable portrayal of the country for audiences abroad.

A Narrative of the Andean People The fictional world of Madeinusa is Manayaycuna (‘the town that no one can enter’), an isolated village in the Peruvian highlands, during the last three days of Easter celebrations—from Good Friday to Easter Sunday— a period of time locally called Tiempo Santo (Holy Time). According to local religious tradition, during the Tiempo Santo (which covers the period between Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection) God is dead and cannot see people’s sins; therefore, the town’s inhabitants feel completely free and unrestricted by human as well as by divine laws. Llosa presents the Tiempo Santo in terms of the cultural syncretism resulting from the historic mixing of native belief and practices with Christian faith brought by Spanish colonizers.44 The villagers perform Western religious ceremonies alongside practices considered taboo in the West such as sexual promiscuity, partner swapping and incest. The story centres on a family formed by Don Cayo (Juan Ubaldo Huamán)—the village’s Mayor—and his two daughters, Madeinusa (Magaly Solier) and Chale (Yiliana Chong). The three share the same bed while Don Cayo impatiently waits for the opportunity to take his elder daughter’s virginity during the Tiempo Santo, a common practice within the village. Madeinusa seems to accept the paternal desire in exchange for winning a local pageant that is part of the celebrations. The plot begins when a foreigner, Salvador (Carlos J. De la Torre)—whose name in Spanish means ‘saviour’—a geologist on his way to a nearby mine, arrives at the village. Because of the festivities, he cannot continue his journey and ends up trapped there against his will, becoming a witness to the town’s libertine practices. Taking advantage of his presence, Madeinusa plans her escape and begs him to take her to Lima. The young man, who first refuses, eventually accepts after witnessing the incest between the teenager and her father. What at

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the beginning seems to be an obvious relationship of victim/saviour is reversed at the end of the film as Madeinusa poisons Don Cayo, blames Salvador for the homicide and escapes to Lima. In this story, full of tensions, confrontations, blackmail and exchangeable roles,45 the narrative of the Indigenous people is linear and constructed around a number of dualistic oppositions identified with Indigenous peoples. The main, and most obvious, opposition is between the ‘rural’ and the ‘urban’, presented as the non-Western confronting the ‘Westernized’ world. The opposition is ethnic, geopolitical and economic. Manayaycuna is inhabited entirely by Indigenous Quechuaspeaking people and is cut off from the rest of the world: there are neither telephones nor proper roads; it is not reached by commodities from the capital and it takes three days to reach the nearest village; there is no electric light nor hot water; and technologies such as photography and sound recording are virtually unknown. The urban and Westernized culture is represented by Salvador and Lima, the city where he lives. The latter is evoked throughout the film as the place of modern life and salvation: ‘He will take me to Lima’, ‘I will go away to Lima’, Madeinusa repeatedly tells her sister Chale. The arrival of Salvador serves to redefine the village’s material and cultural characteristics as things that ‘lack’. ‘Lacking’ is a key mechanism of what Shohat and Stam call ‘transformational grammar of colonial style racism’: ‘the projection of the racially stigmatized as deficient in terms of European norms, as lacking in order, intelligence, sexual modesty, material civilization, even history’.46 Manayaycuna’s description follows those patterns: the Tiempo Santo consists of an institutionalized absence of law and order and is characterized by sexual unrestraint; the town does not have the everyday technology brought by Salvador; the villagers seem naïve, lacking awareness and knowledge.47 The positing of lack is particularly evident within the relationship between Salvador, a blonde white youth who possesses ‘know how’, and Madeinusa, the Indigenous teenager who is oblivious to what she possesses. Following a trope common in the representations of the primitive, she asks ‘What is that?’ and reacts imitating her own recorded voice when she sees and listens to Salvador’s tape recorder. She does not know the world outside her village, whereas he is part of it: when meeting Salvador she compares him with the only foreign cultural model to which she has access—some old women’s magazines from the 1940s–1960s. Moreover, Madeinusa does not know the real meaning of her name (‘Made in USA’ is written on Salvador’s shirt); it is Salvador

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who explains it to her. There is, however, a pattern that escapes from the grammar of colonial racism: Manayaycuna does not lack history. Furthermore, the village represents the whole of Peruvian history since native culture still survives there. Even so, Llosa insists on applying Western evolutionist historicism to Andean history: Manayaycuna is depicted as ‘primitive’ and behind in its journey towards modernity. Salvador is the narrative element that constantly stresses the village’s backwardness (Fig. 2.2). Manayaycuna has a key role in the film’s mise-en-scène since it is the space and location of the story and a large number of close-ups focusing on details of its life and traditions. The village’s cultural identity is also foregrounded by the presence of the Quechua language in the songs. According to Shohat and Stam, the representation of the voice is a cinematic mechanism that challenges Eurocentrism by producing a polycentric and multicultural approach. Yet, unlike the case of La teta asustada, the presence of Quechua in this film is very limited and belongs only to an ‘irrational and sentimental dimension’.48 This is not only inconsistent with the depiction of the fictional Manayaycuna, but also, and more importantly, it does not alter the power dynamics of filmic and non-filmic representations of Andean cultures in favour of a legibility of the plot for the non-Quechua speaking audience. Furthermore, despite its centrality, Manayaycuna is not only represented through the aforementioned category of ‘lack’, but also through the tropes of an imperialist Eurocentric discourse which serves to give form to a ‘figurative substratum within the discourse of empire’.49 The first trope we find in the film is the ‘animalization’ of the inhabitants of Manayaycuna: they have not made reason prevail over their ‘unrestrained libido’ and instincts; they do not repress the universal primordial drive of incest; furthermore, as Gonzalo Portocarrero explains, ‘the film presents the events as symptomatic, […] not as isolated casualties’, highlighting ‘the lack of civilization, law and authority’.50 Meanwhile, according to Ricardo Bedoya, at a symbolic level the world of Manayaycuna, ‘finds its double […] in animals: lice, insects or rats whose death and birth represent an elementary as well as predator universe’.51 The second trope is the ‘infantilization’ of the characters, which ‘projects the colonized as embodying an earlier stage of individual human or broad cultural development’.52 This is evident in Madeinusa’s reactions to Salvador’s physical features and tape recorder, and also in Salvador’s initial paternalistic attitude towards Madeinusa when she ‘offers’ him her body. The third trope is the subject

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Fig. 2.2 The village of Manayaycuna preparing for the Tiempo Santo celebrations (Courtesy of Wanda Films)

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of ‘rape’. Llosa tackles this issue ambiguously: it is not clear who is the victimizer and who is the victim, whether Don Cayo, who has a sexual relationship with his daughter, or Salvador, who ends up taking her virginity, or Madeinusa, who first agrees with Don Cayo and later seduces Salvador in order to punish her father. Sexuality is the field of an important displacement operated at plot level. As several scholars have indeed suggested, Madeinusa’s decisions regarding her sexuality (and, later, regarding Salvador’s responsibility) show the character’s agency and autodetermination (Monette, Vilanova) as well as how the director manipulates ‘the passive role ascribed to her by native and criollo patriarchal societies’.53 Nevertheless, it is somewhat problematic that the act of incest is presented through the character of Salvador. The spectator’s view is mediated by Salvador’s: we do not see the actual sexual act; what we see is Salvador looking at it. If Salvador is ‘a point of access for the audience that will be viewing the unfamiliar highlands world for the first time’ as Kroll states,54 it is then somewhat controversial that he mediates the audience’s access to an action identified with abuse as well as a lack of legality and morality. La teta asustada is structured around the same type of dualistic narrative and the same opposition between Andean and Western categories. The scene best representing this is the one in which Fausta is taken to the doctor with a nosebleed and a fainting episode after her mother’s death. The dialogue between Fausta’s uncle and the doctor verbalizes the dualistic structure of the film: She bleeds […] only when she is frightened. She lived in the village during the difficult times. Fausta was born during the years of terrorism. Her mother transmitted her fear through breast milk. La teta asustada, that’s what they call those children who were born like she was, without a soul, hidden under the ground because of the fear. Such an illness doesn’t exist here, right, doctor?

According to the worldview expressed by Fausta’s uncle, Peruvian society is divided into a ‘here’, Lima, and a ‘there’, the Andes. As happens in Madeinusa, the division here is between rationality and progress, and irrationality and tradition. In reply to the uncle’s explanation, the doctor stresses the distance between the two worlds: there is no place where such an illness could exist, he says, and the nosebleed is due to capillary fragility, a problem that can be easily solved through a little operation.

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The opposition is between two different systems of thought as well as different logics; each one has its own language: ‘the frightened breast’ is symbolic language, whereas that of the doctor (filled with terms such as womb, inflamed, infection) draws on Western science. Medical science admits a solution whereas indigenuos beliefs do not: ‘she bleeds because of the illness, because of the teta asustada, she was born with that. It’s nothing to do with potatoes!’, the uncle repeats, exasperated. The opposition Lima/Andes appears again in the subsequent dialogue between Fausta and her uncle. Now the roles partially vary as the uncle represents Western logic against Fausta’s non-Western reasoning: ‘here in Lima things are different’, he says, trying to convince her that what she fears no longer exists. While some scholars have seen the doctor’s scene as one that foregrounds cultural difference and, indeed, vindicates non-Western beliefs, I contend that this scene is one of the ways in which the film undermines the very important job it had previously done in foregrounding Andean victims’ voices and beliefs to which I alluded in the first section of this chapter. The dialogue in the scene and the subsequent one between Lúcido and Fausta, articulate a controversially dichotomous image of the Peruvian nation, as I shall go on to argue. Moreover, the film does not continue to foreground Andean beliefs; it does not sustain any exploration of Quechua Indigenous culture. In addition, as happens with the character of Salvador in Madeinusa, the doctor in La teta asustada mediates the transnational audience’s gaze on what is constructed as the nonWestern ‘other’. In the films analysed in this book, the ‘Westerner’ is often a problematic figure and, as it will become clear in the following chapters, the films that have managed to undermine imperialist and Eurocentric imaginaries are often those that have reworked such a figure, either by inverting the positioning of knowledge and lack of knowledge, or simply erasing the question of knowledge from the plot altogether. The figure of uncle Lúcido is more innovative despite the unsubtle metaphorical meaning of his name as of those of the other characters (Noé, Perpetua). Lúcido still shares Fausta’s traditional values while acquiring ‘Western’ ones. He can be defined as a ‘migrant’, someone who, as the Peruvian critic Cornejo Polar explains, ‘installs himself/herself in two up-to-a-point antagonistic worlds: on one side, yesterday and there, on the other, here and now’.55 From an anthropological perspective, the uncle embodies the phenomenon of ‘transculturation’, a term coined by the Cuban Fernando Ortiz in 1940 to describe the processes involved in

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the cultural transmutations that occurred in Cuba. The concept encompasses the stages of deculturation, acculturation and the creation of a new cultural identity.56 The process of transculturation is represented in fact throughout the film by the uncle’s whole family whose cultural and social practices are a mix of Andean and urban coastal elements. In contrast, Fausta, at once foreign both to her family and to Aída’s world, and being deeply immersed in what is presented as specifically Andean (music, traditions and belief), appears to represent a somewhat ‘authentic’ Andean culture, which ‘resists’ the new one. Aída’s character is also constructed around a set of oppositions. Her austere neo-colonial mansion stands in contrast to the surrounding world of movement, colour and noise of the lower classes in the modern city. Its garden walls separate a world of urban vitality from one of solitude, silence, dim lights and empty rooms. Vibrant colour, stirring music, and energetic movement are opposed to obscure tones, silence and emptiness. Again, we see Peru as a country with two faces and two identities, represented hyperbolically through mise-en-scène. As in the case of Madeinusa, the ‘non-white’ Peru is placed at the thematic and spatial centre of the film: Indigenous and mestizo people from the urban fringes are the protagonists of every shot. Fausta seems to be a stranger in both worlds. In the outside world, that of the streets, she is always running, as if to allude metaphorically to the fear that prevents her from living.57 In the world of interior space represented by Aída’s house, she gets lost in a labyrinth of corridors and rooms while looking with awe at television cartoons or fancy bars of soap. As was the case with the previous film, the representation of Indigenous people reformulates categories and tropes articulated by nineteenth-century colonialist discourse, which described Indigenous people as inferior subjects with a child-like ingenuousness. This is strikingly exemplified when Fausta seems to look at television cartoons for the very first time. Despite having had more access to modernity, the uncle is no less ingenuous: when the doctor asks him for a second time whether he knows about the potato placed in Fausta’s vagina, he replies: ‘it might have got there by itself, my home is often full of food’. Moreover, even after disclosing to the doctor that Fausta was born during the tiempo duro [difficult time], an expression translating the sasachakuy tiempo used by Quechua-speakers to refer to the internal armed conflict, he does not view the insertion of the potato in terms of a strategy of female resistance and an antirape device, as Fausta maintains in the following dialogue with him.58

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Dualities in terms of geography, race, class, culture, symbolic universes, languages and systems of values recur throughout the two films. These dualities can be recapitulated, establishing certain patterns at a paradigmatic level: province/city, sierra/coast, Indigenous/white, peasant or lower class/upper class, non-Western/Western, primitive/civilized, irrational/rational, and traditional/modern. The syntagmatic relationship of those elements is as follows: the peasant Indigenous world is one of primitive culture, values and traditions, is ingenuous as well as ‘barbaric’ and just as it has suffered in the past, it currently suffers from abuse. Despite the strategies of resistance and the expressions of agency, its only possible positive future—as the narratives in both films demonstrate—is a secure journey towards civilization. Llosa’s reading of Peruvian society is rooted in late nineteenth-century ideas of nation. Half a century after independence was gained in 1821, a vision of Peru as a nation with a pyramidal structure, formed at the top by the criollo elite in power and below by the Indigenous multitudes, became well established. Cultural production reflected this image of Peru, articulating the narrative of the Indigenous world that, I would suggest, constitutes the discursive tradition that Llosa re-elaborates at the beginning of the twenty-first century. For instance, the main elements of Llosa’s new narrative can be found in Clorinda Matto de Turner’s emblematic novel Aves sin Nido (Birds Without a Nest ). Written in 1889, the novel denounces the abuse and exploitation suffered by the Andean native population and vindicates the presence of the Andean people in the Liberals’ national programme; it describes Peruvian society through the dichotomy barbarism/civilization. The novel is set in the fictional Andean village Killac, where an educated young couple, Lucía y Fernando Marín, come to reside. Life in Killac is dominated by corruption and the abuse suffered by the Indigenous inhabitants. Matto de Turner represents the highlands as a space lacking the civilization one can find in the capital city. In Killac, the major civilized elements are already corrupt; local powers (Church and ruling classes) take advantage of the ‘non-civilized’. The Indigenous population is victim of sexual as well as economic abuse. The foreign couple, who represent a contemporary reformist ideology subscribed to by the author, decide to fight local corruption; in their defence of the village’s inhabitants, they manage to save an Indigenous family. The final salvation is to be found in Lima, the civilized city where the ‘heart is educated and intelligence is trained’.59 Escaping from Killac,

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the Maríns eventually make it to the capital taking two adopted young Indigenous females with them. As Llosa would do many years later, Matto de Turner describes Indigenous subjects in terms of lack: they are deprived of civilization, knowledge, intelligence and astuteness. Mirroring the period’s Romantic Indianism, Social Darwinism and Positivist discourses, the Indigenous people are, on the one hand, associated with childhood (they are represented as human beings who need to be protected); on the other, they are degenerate beings due to biological decadence, environment and nutritional habits. In addition to the grammar of lack and the abovementioned dualities, Madeinusa shares three specific key aspects with Matto de Turner’s novel: the theme of incest, the intervention of a foreign agent and the narrative of salvation through escape. In Aves sin Nido, the incest is linked to a rape that is not described overtly. The Indigenous female teenager adopted by the Maríns falls in love with a youngster who turns out to be her half-brother; both are children of women who were raped by the local bishop. In Madeinusa, the incest is overt and, as in Aves sin Nido, is regarded as a normal local practice. Yet, while such behaviours are presented in both works as symptomatic of ‘primitive’ societies, Matto de Turner links incest to the corruption of the civilized (clergymen) whereas, for Llosa, it must be attributed to the lack of civilization of the Indigenous population. The element that perturbs this behaviour and hence, acts as a catalyst for the main narrative is the intrusion of an external force: the Maríns and Salvador, respectively. In both stories, the foreigner is educated and civilized. Both seem to elucidate Cornejo Polar’s claim that in Matto de Turner’s novel the Andean subject enters ‘history by getting in contact with the more modernized side of Peruvian society’.60 Llosa, however, as I have pointed out, does not deny history to Andean people; on the contrary, she confers on them the symbolic possession of a Peruvian national past, as well as the possession of ancient traditions. What she does not confer on them is the possibility of a history that does not correspond to Western evolutionism. In that sense, she applies a pattern from nineteenth-century primitivist discourse: ‘the Primitive’, writes Michael Pickering, ‘existed in a state of fundamental “underdevelopment,” and therefore in “societies without history,” for history as progressive evolutionism belonged to “us”’.61 The foreigner provokes similar reactions in both Killac and Manayaycuna; the two villages fight against the stranger as the latter does not accept local practices: in Matto

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de Turner’s novel, local powers fight against the Maríns in order to continue the exploitation of the Indigenous population; in Llosa’s film, the villagers confront Salvador and the Mayor locks him up in a farmyard. On the other hand, the foreigner also represents salvation: the Maríns save the teenagers, while the presence of Salvador facilitates Madeinusa’s escape to Lima. Both Aves sin Nido and Madeinusa, as well as, one can argue, La teta asustada, end with an escape towards the ‘Western’ world. Yet the liberation entails the abandonment of native culture. The story of the Maríns is continued in Matto de Turner’s novel Herencia [Heredity] (1893), where we find out that the education of one of the two teenagers, Margarita, has indeed been a process of ‘whitening’ involving the loss of her Andean heritage and the acquisition of that of the criollos.62 The films go even further, stating the impossible reconciliation between the two cultures that seem to form a Peruvian imagined community. According to Portocarrero, ‘[Madeinusa’s] message is that the salvation of the ‘archaic’ lies in an individual change that entails abandoning the tradition’.63 Despite the claims of the director, therefore, the proposal of the film is neither that of a process of ‘syncretism’, ‘exchange’ or ‘communication’, nor one of complex renegotiations of identities; her political and cultural proposal is rather a linear path that goes from Andean tradition towards Western modernity. That said, an important difference between the novel and the films concerns the ways in which Indigenous salvation is represented. In Aves sin Nido, the Indigenous subjects are not capable of changing the status quo; they need to be saved by the ‘civilized’ people (i.e. the Maríns). Thus, the story reflects a contemporary political discourse according to which the change of Indigenous people’s conditions would depend on reforms carried out by the ruling classes. In contrast, the female characters in Madeinusa and La teta asustada perform their own salvation.

The Indigenista Type Aves sin Nido is considered a frontrunner of literary Indigenismo, a trend that arose at the beginning of the twentieth century and which was hence contemporaneous with the advent Peruvian Indigenismo as a complex cultural phenomenon. Constituting a socio-political and intellectual movement that vindicated ‘Indian’ society, Indigenismo sought the ‘resurgence of the Andean culture’64 and forged proposals of regional and national identity rooted in Pre-Columbian culture. Indigenismo also

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refers to a range of artistic expressions (literature, art, dance, performances, theatre, music), which arose between the 1920s and 1950s, and which were centred on Inca and Indigenous Andean cultures. These traditional cultural practices played an important role in the development of ‘longings for a regional, national, and continental identity’, as Zoila Mendoza explains in relation to Cusqueño folklore,65 while others were apolitical and aestheticist, as Natalia Majluf states in relation to the visual production of painter José Sabogal.66 In Peruvian literature, Indigenismo was a dominant trend for decades. Literary scholars usually differentiate two stages of indigenista literature: the 1920–1940s Indigenismo, characterized by dichotomic and distant representations of an Indigenous population either idealized or victimized, and the neo-Indigenismo of the 1950s and beyond, which engaged more deeply with both the situation of Indigenous populations and their culture. In a germane fashion, Llosa’s films construct an Andean visual ‘type’ whose patterns derive mainly from indigenista art and photography. Those visual artists did not depict ‘individuals’, but rather idealized subjects who were designed to represent Andean culture as well as the ‘authentic’ roots of the nation. They constructed ‘types’; that is, paraphrasing Edwin Panofsky, ideal figures that seek to bring out what the subject has in common with certain groups and represent them.67 The indigenista visual type results from a set of aesthetic strategies: on the one hand, the creation of a visual consensus on native physiognomy through the minimum use of physical features, the representation of native cultural products, and the synthetic representation of the Andean landscape68 ; on the other, the depiction of the Andean characteristics as they had been described by indigenista ideologues. As one can appreciate in two major indigenista works such as José Sabogal’s Hilandera (Spinner) (1923) and Julia Codesido’s India huanca (Huanca Indigenous Woman) (1932), the subjects possess similar facial features and attributes. The spinner represents the ‘sombre gesture’ and ‘inexpressive features’ of the native—two qualities studied by indigenista theoretician Luis Valcárcel.69 Her activity is a ‘cultural product’ widely recognized as typical. The artists’ goal was not to communicate truthfulness, but rather to achieve a sublime idealization. As critic Mirko Lauer explains, ‘the anonymity of the Indian in the indigenista art responds to an ideological aim: erecting him as a collective symbol’.70 In both paintings, the Andean landscape is reduced to a simplified architecture and a natural environment. As part of a visual type, the landscape becomes

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an attribute representing the ‘telluric’ qualities of Andean people whose culture ‘is the result of such objective conditions’ and who possess a ‘very close link with the geographical and economic condition of territory’.71 The indigenista approach to the Andean world was that of the outsider who assumed Westernized cultural perspectives such as the artistic avantgarde and Western traditions.72 The indigenista landscape, for example, is often bucolic, representing an idea of authenticity rooted in European classicist tradition. So called indigenista photography followed similar patterns. Juan Manuel Figueroa Aznar’s Q’ero tocando quena (Q’ero playing quena) (c. 1915/20) does not include any Andean element in the backdrop. The sitter’s pose follows patterns established by Romantic Indianism, a chronologically idealist prior trend that sought to construct an authentic and pure native visual identity within the nineteenth-century discourse on the ‘primitive’. Likewise, Martín Chambi’s Tristeza andina (Andean Sadness) (1933) represents the native subject as an ideal romantic type. Here, despite the fact that the outdoor setting makes the image much more ‘truthful’, the vastness of the Andes and the contrasting isolated figure of the subject still refer to the Romantic sublime pictorial landscape. On the other hand, the presence of a llama and of native artistic expressions creates the image of a primordial and authentic shepherd, of which there are representations dating back to ancient Western mythology. Almost a century later, Llosa follows indigenista iconography and strategies. In Madeinusa, the Andean identity of many characters is embodied by the very presence of their racialized features, their traditional clothes and the recurrent presence of local craftwork such as pots and jugs. Don Cayo, for example, declares the arrival of the Tiempo Santo by breaking a pot. The local landscape is idyllic, dramatic and uncontaminated. It establishes the geographical frame of the story and is linked to the characters: Madeinusa moves easily in the outskirts of the village, whereas nature is an obstacle for Salvador. In La teta asustada, Andean tellurism is transformed into ‘animism’ and linked to the sort of nature one can find in an urban context. The characters representing the ‘authentic’ Andean culture—Fausta and Aída’s gardener—share an animistic vision of the world according to which flowers and plants have souls: ‘unlike men, plants tell the truth’, the gardener states. Llosa extends this animism up to the point of granting life to inanimate objects: the piano, for example, keeps playing although broken. Through the character of Fausta, Llosa also seem to re-elaborate the indigenista topos of

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Andean sorrow. Like the subject of Chambi’s Tristeza Andina, Fausta avoids contact with the world. However, importantly, in the film (as will be the case with the film Wiñaypacha, analysed in Chapter 8), sorrow is not an ahistorical and perennial feature of the Indigenous woman; rather it has a precise historical cause, namely political and military violence. In such a way, the film actually counters the notion of Andean sorrow, described in indigenista works. The topos of Andean inexpressive features is altogether more problematic. Interestingly, this is a trait that we find in Fausta as well as in the protagonist of Ixcanul (both young protagonists barely speak and neither shows an expression nor exteriorize their feelings) which seems to reformulate indigenista markers of difference for the foreign audience. As the indigenistas did, Llosa approaches the Andean world from outside. Her films could be described as ‘heterogeneous’. Cornejo Polar applied the concept of ‘heterogeneity’ to Indigenista literature since, as he explains, while being inscribed in a (Western) culture, it vindicates another (non-Western) culture: indigenista writers are not Indigenous themselves, they generally come from a provincial mestizo or criollo urban lower middle class; their public is not Indigenous either; and the artistic forms they use as well as the system of values they represent are Western.73 Llosa is an artist culturally and socially far from her object of representation: her values and the devices she uses come from Lima’s criollo middle class as well as from abroad. Llosa herself stresses her cultural distance from the Andean world by stating that travelling through Peru is like travelling through a foreign land. The concept of heterogeneity underlines useful convergences but it does not satisfactorily explain the process of construction of a ‘new Andean type’ that Llosa seems to carry out nor the ways in which Llosa draws on indigenista patterns. What I would like to emphasize here is Llosa’s inscription within a discursive tradition that sees and describes the Indigenous subject as, in Lauer’s words, the ‘local exotic’.74

Anthropological Patterns Even as she adopts Indigenista strategies, Llosa transforms their representational models by using an array of diverse cultural elements and contemporary aesthetic languages. A key element in this reformulation is the Andean anthropological studies carried out since the 1930s, which have disseminated a corpus of knowledge about Quechua-speaking

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Andean populations among the literate public in Lima. The use of such knowledge has allowed Llosa to achieve two goals. Firstly, she has been able to construct an articulated representation of Andean society, inventing complex fictional social and cultural practices of imaginary Andean communities. Secondly, she has given verisimilitude to those practices and, consequently, to her cinematic representation. In regard to Madeinusa specifically, Llosa explains that: ‘the events represented are not real since they have not happened, though they could happen’. Given that the film’s focus is, as she puts it, on ‘the ways in which [Andean people] interpret and reinterpret what comes from outside’ (Madeinusa) and on the ‘coexistence and distance between the capital and the Andean region’ (La teta asustada), the search for verisimilitude becomes crucial.75 In addition, as Shohat and Stam explain, ‘films which represent marginalized cultures in a realistic mode, even when they do not claim to represent specific historical incidents, still implicitly make factual claims’.76 Llosa re-elaborates two fundamental patterns studied, explained, and applied in the fictional work of Peruvian ethnographer and writer José María Arguedas: the Quechua language and Andean music. The main characters sing or/and speak in Quechua, but the language is not just a means of communication: singing in their native language is, as already stated, for Madeinusa and Fausta a medium of expression. In the case of Fausta, the songs seem to be her authentic language; singing seems natural to her, while speaking does not. Consequently, songs have a narrative function in both films. For instance, as in the case of La teta asustada, Madeinusa opens with a song in Quechua, which, once simultaneously translated in subtitles, tells the story of a woman who leaves her village so as to hint at the reasons behind the absence of Madeinusa’s mother. By incorporating songs into the narrative, Llosa re-elaborates the anthropological information produced by Arguedas in the 1950s about the importance of music in Andean culture, and also a literary technique that turns songs into ‘dramatizations of the plots, and narrations of scenes’,77 which Arguedas himself used in his novel Los ríos profundos [Deep Rivers]. While the songs included by Arguedas in his book were composed collectively by the Andean community, those used by Llosa are composed in solitude by the female characters. Music is also a vital cultural element in the life of the Andean communities in both Manayaycuna and Lima’s suburbs. It is the music of collective celebrations and dances, of religious and social rituals. Rituals are important visual and narrative moments within the diegesis of the

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film, and hence play a key role as they represent the Andean lifestyle and values. They are fictional constructions resulting from a hybrid ‘operation’, which consists of mixing different cultural and anthropological sources with invented practices not always associated with Andean society. Let us consider the case of the Tiempo Santo, for example. For her fictional construction of this religious belief, Llosa reformulates a cultural phenomenon crucial in the formation of the whole of Latin America: the historical mix of cultures, religions and ethnicities that was initiated with the Conquest. Llosa makes particular reference to religious syncretism. According to William Rowe and Vivian Schelling: ‘Popular Catholicism in rural Latin America tends to be a combination of native pre-Columbian elements, Spanish popular Catholicism of the sixteenth century and the teaching of the official Church’.78 Llosa’s construction of the Tiempo Santo ritual mixes the religious procession and the pagan practice of carnival. The Andean Indigenous carnival-style practices studied by Arguedas are the so called pqllay, celebrations that take place during the rainy season and seem to include elements from ancient warrior rituals.79 They are very different from the European carnival; the only shared aspect is the period of the year in which they are carried out. There are, however, other types of carnival practices in the Peruvian Andes. Arguedas also studied mestizo carnivals, which are characterized by dances, music and the use of masks, as well as by the election of a queen, who is carried through the village on a throne with religious overtones.80 The carnivalstyle celebration of Manayaycuna does not have much in common with the Andean carnival; it does, nonetheless, share significant aspects with the mestizo festivity as described by Arguedas. In Arguedas’ studies, however, the difference made between ‘Indian’ and ‘mestizo’ cultures is of crucial importance while in Llosa there is no attempt to address those differentiations. Furthermore, Manayaycuna’s practices also seem to be a re-elaboration of the original roots of the Western carnival: the Greek and Roman Bacchanalia and Saturnalia, during which ‘in Dionysian rituals involving the use of masks and disguises, sexual orgies and much drinking and eating, singing and dancing, the established social values and hierarchies that governed everyday life were temporarily inverted’.81 Picking up on these pagan rituals, the celebration of the Tiempo Santo is characterized by a suspension of the social order that leads to gluttony, drunkenness and sexual transgression. Meanwhile, from Andean culture, Llosa takes the kind of sexual practices that would be censured by contemporary ‘civilized’ society. The sexual disorder of the Tiempo Santo seems

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to be vaguely analogous to a traditional Andean celebration which takes place at the final stages of a ritual related to aqueduct cleaning and is described by Arguedas in the short story ‘El Ayla’.82 During this festivity, Andean people have sexual relations collectively in the fields while singing hymns and screaming ritualistic interjections. In Arguedas’ short story, white señores and mestizos are horrified by what they see as if it were barbaric and primitive. Salvador’s disgusted reaction recalls that of the señores. His reaction, however, is not intended to question the ways in which the whites have historically looked at the natives, as is the case with the short story, but rather to reaffirm their validity. Hence, like the doctor scene in La teta asustada, the depiction of the carnival is another instance that undermines the film’s counter-hegemonic work. In line with carnival traditions, the inhabitants of Manayaycuna wear masks. Some masks have the form of enormous nose-penises. The presence of celebratory masks in the Andes is a practice well studied by anthropologists. According to Pagán-Teitelbaum, the use of representations of the penis, instead of the traditional forms that were meant to make fun of Spanish colonizers, is part of a ‘false ethnography’ created by the director. In Pagán-Teitelbaum’s view, the film offers a ‘picturesque, distorted and degenerate [vision] of Indigenous traditions and poverty in the Andes’.83 Although there is a certain validity to the notion of ‘false ethnography’, I would argue that the film does something more complex: namely, it combines a number of traditions in order to create a hybrid Andean type recognizable as ‘other’. These traditions are not necessarily related to the Andean Indigenous world, although they refer to forms of otherness located on the geographical or historical margins of the Western world, as is the case with carnival. With respect to the penisnose masks, they could refer to the aforementioned Mediterranean pagan traditions, but also to the so-called huacos eróticos, or sexually graphic ceramics produced by the pre-Columbian Mochica civilization between the first and seventh centuries CE. The huacos eróticos represent masculine and feminine genital organs; today, tourists can buy modern reproductions. The use of those masks is a way of reducing the difference of Andean culture to something familiar: a transgressive sexuality that has been historically assigned to the non-Western subject by an orientalist gaze. This hybrid ‘operation’, which Pagán-Teitelbaum calls false ethnography, is relevant, not because it offers a distorted image of the Andes, as the critic seems to propose, but rather because it simplifies and typifies the ‘ethnically other’, reshaping pre-existent discourses that involve the

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power relation between the Andean and the Western. Therefore, I am not proposing, as many reviewers and commentators have indeed claimed, that the problem of the film lies in its lack of realism in relation to the off-screen realities depicted on the screen; rather, I posit that the problem lies in the re-actualization of a problematic imaginary of the non-Western world. This is not to suggest that the issue of realism should be dismissed. On the contrary, in representations dealing with subaltern populations and/or the legacies of colonialism, the issue of realism cannot be downplayed by relying on the fictional nature of cinematic representation. As Shohat and Stam maintain, on the one hand, ‘spectators are invested in realism because they are invested in the idea of truth and reserve the right to confront a film with their own personal and cultural knowledge’ and, on the other, a film ‘whatever its conventional disclaimers, implicitly makes, and is received as making, historical-realist claims’.84 The concept of truth should not be understood here ontologically: ‘although there is no absolute truth, no truth apart from representation and dissemination, there are still contingent, qualified, perspectival truths in which communities are invested’.85 It can be argued that Llosa’s films do make historicalrealist claims, which are emphasized by the films’ search for verisimilitude. The cinematic style of the films plays a key role in this search. Madeinusa, for example, shows a commitment to truthfulness that at times aligns it with documentary realism. This is apparent in Llosa’s use of techniques derived from documentary filmmaking: the location is a real Andean village, most of the furniture and clothes are authentic, the characters are local Quechua speakers rather than professional actors. The mise-en-scène consists of rituals, settings, dances and songs that are truly (at least in the case of a number of the settings) or verisimilarly Andean. The centrality of the rituals and the use of anthropological sources contribute to the idea that the film is a visual study of present-day life in the Andes. The absence, for most of the film, of a subjective point of view reinforces the sense of objective representation. That Madeinusa apparently succeeded in its verisimilar representation of the Andean world was reflected in Peruvian and European reviews that signalled the film’s ‘sociological, political, psychological and theological elements’ and its capacity for creating ‘a vivid picture of a society and its problems’.86

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Appropriations of Modernity The Tiempo Santo is preceded by the election of the village’s most beautiful young virgin through a beauty contest. The elected young woman will act as the Virgin Mary during the religious ritual. The contest, won by Madeinusa, follows contemporary conventions that have become universally known thanks to the mass media: the young ladies stand on a stage, a presenter introduces them and then declares the winner. Dressed up as the Virgin Mary, the girl is later carried around the village on an ornate portable platform hoisted up on people’s shoulders. The resulting visual effect is one of a Spring Parade float rather than a religious procession. Clearly, the presence of imported practices in a village depicted as isolated and remote is an inconsistency that allows us to analyse more deeply the ways in which Llosa understands the relationship between autochthonous ‘tradition’ and Westernized ‘modernity’ in the Andes. The director has stated that the real theme of the film is indeed such a relationship: ‘starting from the title of the film, Madeinusa, we are talking about syncretism, the attraction for what is foreign, [and] how [natives] return it in a different, new form’.87 The conceptual term that better explains this negotiation between tradition and modernity is that of ‘appropriation’, which in visual art studies refers to the ‘artwork’s adoption of pre-existing elements’.88 Unlike concepts such as ‘borrowing’ or ‘influence’, ‘appropriation’ emphasizes the willingness to adopt. The film conveys the image of an Andean world appropriating, reformulating and transforming foreign cultural models (the contests and the ideal of female beauty). The name ‘Madeinusa’ [Made in the USA] and the presence of magazines in Don Cayo’s house are two more appropriations of foreign modernity. They are also distortions of their original models: ‘Appropriation, like myth […] is a distortion, not a negation of the prior semiotic assemblage’.89 The film stresses the latter process: Madeinusa appropriates her Western name to such an extent that she denies the very existence of its English source since she does not believe that her name means anything else; furthermore, she writes her name on the cover of the Maribel magazine, erasing the original title, thus emphasizing symbolically her appropriation. How should we interpret the new assemblage and the very process of appropriation? On the one hand, the appropriation can be seen as a way of dismissing the hegemonic authority of Western culture through a subaltern re-elaboration; Beasley-Murray understands Madeinusa’s gesture of

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‘re-writing’ the magazine’s title in those terms.90 While I agree that the gesture bears anti-hegemonic potential, I would nevertheless suggest, in line with what has been argued so far, that that same potential is ultimately undermined by the overall conventional positioning of the tradition and modernity binary: the film’s narrative and mise-en-scène (as well as in the paratextual declarations of the filmmaker in interviews) fails to question this standard opposition just as the denouement offers a necessary escape in the form of what is presented in the film as a Westernized world. There are other instances of potentially anti-hegemonic appropriations. In order to represent the appropriation of modernity by Andean culture, Llosa makes use of the type of transformative aesthetics known as kitsch. Matei Calinescu explains kitsch as a way of dealing with industrial modernity through ‘imitation, forgery, counterfeit, and what we may call the aesthetics of deception and self deception’.91 The image of Madeinusa wearing the traditional cloak of the Virgin while carrying a Polaroid photograph of herself (given to her by Salvador) hanging from her neck as if it was a religious iconis probably the one that best embodies the aesthetics of kitsch. Interestingly, Madeinusa’s aesthetics of kitsch reformulates the artistic language of what has been called the Peruvian ‘Pop Achorado’ of the 1980s. According to Gustavo Buntix, Pop Achorado was a ‘radical way of approaching the social attitude and formal universe of the new urban subject’92 ; in other words, the mestizo and Indigenous migrant. The adjective Achorado describes the ‘defiant’ behaviours of the migrant towards the urban context. The 1980s trend proposed a new visuality informed by a range of influences: North American Pop Art and mass industrial production of the 1960s, the ‘official’ Peruvian Pop of the 1970s (which had been used by the military dictatorship for its political propaganda), post-war print advertising and what the 1980s artists considered to be the real contemporary Peruvian popular culture, that of the migrants who had moved from the rural highlands to the capital. In the installation Sarita Colonia (1980), the collective E. P. S. Huayco placed rows of thousands of empty evaporated milk cans in the desert surrounding Lima and painted the image of ‘Sarita Colonia’ on each one; Sarita Colonia was a 1920s mestizo immigrant who, after her death, had been transformed into a popular ‘saint’. Condemned by the Catholic Church, her cult spread widely among Lima’s immigrant population. According to Delgado, Llosa’s use of ‘a big mural in the form of a retablo [a contemporary Andean folk art form], as a door to the village square’ and the ‘attic full of plaster statues and Coca-Cola cans’ also recall

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Pop Achorado works.93 The Coca-Cola cans, in particular, clearly refer to the above-mentioned installation. Madeinusa’s ‘Pop’ is, however, inconsistent: it is very difficult to explain how Coca-Cola cans (and the new metropolitan mestizo culture) made their way to a village as isolated as Manayaycuna. Most significantly, it is depoliticised; as Delgado puts it, it becomes a decorative and noncritical device as it is used merely for the construction of the setting for a typically ‘Andean’ film.94 The political potential of kitsch is clearer in La teta asustada. Not surprisingly, the aesthetics of kitsch is more recurrent in this film since the urban Andean community has had more access to modernity than the small village of Manayaycuna. In La teta asustada, kitsch serves to portray an Andean culture in transformation. As I have pointed out, Fausta’s family and the rest of the Andean community are depicted in a process of transculturation: from their dress codes to their social practices, their identities are reshaped because of their being migrants. The process of negotiating identities is presented very clearly in the wedding sequences. One of those sequences shows the wedding guests participating in a parade on a red velvet catwalk: with some among them wearing traditional Andean clothes, the guests dance while carrying their presents in their hands. A ‘master of ceremonies’, who is in fact Fausta’s uncle, describes each of the gifts. Here, Llosa creates a mix of contemporary urban dance music developed in Lima’s migrant areas, traditional Andean clothes, and ‘modern’ Western practices such as fashion shows and television contests. The second sequence is that of the wedding of Máxima, Fausta’s cousin. The sequence shows the wedded couple having their photograph taken. Wearing a white wedding dress with a very long train attached to rows of floating balloons that make it ‘fly’ up, Máxima poses with her husband for a formal portrait. The contextual background for the first few photographs is a large neoclassical-style staircase rising up in the middle of the desert; the following photographs depict backdrops of colourful and exotic landscapes that imitate the brochures of Western travel agencies. With regard to the use of the backdrop in postcolonial popular photography, Appadurai states that backdrops for popular photography cease to be the place for the ‘debate on colonial subjectivity’ and become the place for ‘experiments with modernity’.95 In the case of Llosa’s film, the backdrop of the wedding photographs is precisely an experiment with modernity. Although the experimenter is not the Indigenous subject but rather the director, who is, like her audience, foreign to

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the culture represented by the characters and offers her own interpretation of popular kitsch, the very depiction of such experiments reflect the anti-hegemonic potential of kitsch aesthetics. In Peru, the kind of popular urban culture interpreted and represented by Llosa in La teta asustada is known as ‘chicha’. This term (which should not be confused with the pre-Columbian corn fermented beverage) began to be used in the 1970s to identify an emerging new urban music that combined ‘an Andean melodic style with tropical rhythm [namely, the Colombian cumbia] and electric guitar as lead instrument’.96 As Fiorella Montero-Díaz explains, ‘Chicha is the musical product of waves of migration from the hinterland to the capital, as Andeans in Lima mixed one expression of their huayno [traditional music] with foreign rhythms such as cumbia, mambo, guarachas’.97 This style resulted into a very popular rhythm, which in the past was associated with Lima’s migrant community and marginality, but since the end of the internal conflict has been appropriated by ‘white’ upper-class musicians and youth.98 It is the same music to which the wedding guests dance while walking on the red carpet.99 Nowadays, the term chicha does not relate solely to music; it refers more generally to the urban culture born in Lima after a surge of immigration from the highlands in the 1940s. The chicha is a contemporary hybrid culture that comes from the mixing of all the different cultures present in Lima—the Andean/Amazonian and the urban/criollo being its major components. According to Arturo Quispe Lázaro, the chicha culture is the manifestation of the shift from an aristocratic criollo society into a mixed and more democratic one; it cuts across social classes and is multidimensional as it concerns society, culture and politics.100 Being a cultural expression that spreads across different cultures and races, the chicha can be understood as a frontier. A frontier is, in Abril Trigo’s words, ‘more a liminality than a limit […], the inscription of multiple and blurred paths’ which implies a ‘transitoriness, a transitivity, a translocality’.101 The case of chicha music is in this sense emblematic. In the 2000s, in the aftermath of the internal conflict, racialised musical genres associated with subalternity, migrant culture, and Andeanness, underwent a process of both revitalization and appropriation among Limeño—‘white’ upperclass youth and performers.102 While ‘stigmatised provincial performers’ reached a wide Lima audience, genres such as chicha and cumbia were revisited by Limeño white upper-class bands, ‘topp[ing] the sales charts in Lima and serv[ing] as a platform for broader discussions on sociocultural,

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class and ethnic interactions’.103 The use of such genres in La teta asustada cannot be fully understood without taking into account this trend towards a ‘broadening of white upper class music’.104 What is significant is that while in Peruvian musical culture chicha music represented a challenge to hegemonic and racialised tastes, in the film, such music and culture do not cut across races or classes, but are specific to the marginal subjects. In that sense, this musical form becomes a way of establishing rather than blurring a border between two ethnic and social identities: the popular–mestizo/Andean and the upper class–criollo. The representation of the Manchay community has also been interpreted as another element which serves to undermine the memory discourse of the film. In a compelling analysis of the film’s portrayal of the culture of ‘choledad’, that is, ‘the aesthetic manifestation of the process of integration of the migrant into the contemporary city’, Cynthia Vich argues that La teta asustada aestheticizes and commodifies the figure of the cholo migrant105 ; that is, the representative model of capitalist success from the margins that relies on the erasure of the memory of political violence. The key figure of such a process is the ‘local hero’ uncle Lúcido whose discourse at his daughter’s wedding embodies the figure of the successful patriarch within a neoliberal capitalist model.106 Yet, the reinvention and triumph of the migrant in the urban market also implies the abandonment of sorrow and painful memories and a ‘progression’, as exemplified when he says to Fausta ‘I do not want sad memories’.107 Hence, following Vich’s reading of the migrant’s characterization and the wedding scene, the appropriation of modernity discussed above would imply an unravelling (as manifested in the plot, camerawork and mise-enscène) of the memories so carefully crafted through songs and bodies at the beginning of the film. We could certainly read this as the display of a set of complex negotiations on remembering, forgetting and reconciliation. Even so, it must also be noted that the film does not carry out or suggest any explorations of transitional justice and reparation in relation to the victims.

Realism and Magical Realism In relation to the film festival’s category of ‘World Cinema’, scholars of film studies have interrogated the impact of transnational co-productions and film festival culture in the production of ‘neocolonialist reaffirmation’108 as well as the cinematic patterns that attract the ‘bourgeois

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cinephilia [that] is […] at the root of the film festival experience’.109 The field known as ‘World Cinema’ is indeed a contested one: critics tend to agree that ‘an exoticising or othering process is intrinsic to the funding process’110 of such films and even, in the worse cases, an ‘off-putting social decontextualization’.111 On the other hand, others defend transnational co-productions from non-European countries as sites ‘in which it is possible to read the films as a self-referential critique of the constraints placed upon filmmakers by twenty-first-century film-making practices’.112 In terms of filmic patterns, Falicov has identified recurrent features in the ‘globalized art-house aesthetic’ which characterise festival films: ‘a particular narrative, mise-en-scène, use of actors and other aesthetic choices that more easily facilitates transnational border crossing’ and a search for authentic storylines.113 Along the same lines, Lúcia Nagib posits the existence of ‘a global film cinematic aesthetics’ that can be examined through what she calls ‘global film script’: local colour, realism, the private sphere and the improbable but convincing event114 ; while Miriam Ross argues that the expectations of international film festival viewing audiences are ‘developing world conditions of poverty […], and social structures built upon limited resources’.115 Madeinusa and La teta asustada display the kind of combination of the topical and the perennial that seems to work so well in film festivals. They also present several of the features identified by Falicov in her analysis of the global art aesthetics (character-driven narratives, youth as protagonist, a desire for authenticity). Assessments of the impact of the transnational element in Llosa’s films have diverged. While Shaw is critical about the ‘othering’ processes at play in La teta asustada which targeted ‘a specific international cinephile festival audience’,116 and created those ‘distant strangers’ that are unavoidable in world cinema, Dolores Tierney argues that Llosa’s films in fact mitigate the ‘neocolonial influences’ of festival funded films through ‘narratives that are self-consciously constructed to show awareness of the dominant classes’ colonialist gaze and its problematic representational tropes and, by doing so, offer a counter perspective’.117 In terms of aesthetics, Tierney notes that ‘Madeinusa and La teta asustada and other favourites of the festival circuit all share a common use of neorealist modes (location shooting, non-professional actors, an artisanal mode of production, a focus on the quotidian)’.118 The realist mode of production has enabled Llosa to portray real Indigenous Andean peoples, Lima’s urban migrant community as well as allowing real encounters between Indigenous actors and non-Indigenous crew. In thematic terms,

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though, both Madeinusa and La teta asustada counter the realist stance with elements that do not follow (or even question) the patterns of realistic fiction. In her interviews, the director has claimed the presence of the ‘magic’ and the ‘surreal’ in her films. What Llosa defines as magic and surreal should be analysed at two levels: that of the film form and themes, and that of the discourse on Indigenous people. The concept of surrealism can be applied to the films to a certain extent, although not in the sense given to the term by the early-twentieth-century avant-garde movement—namely, the search for a ‘supra’ reality through associations, dreams and the unconscious. The surrealism of Llosa’s films lies rather in a formal mechanism adapted from avant-garde cinema: the alteration of causality. In contrast to surrealist films, this alteration does not result here in a non-narrative; it rather creates an effect of estrangement. In Madeinusa, for example, there is a scene that recurs throughout the film: in the village square, a man marks the time left for the beginning/end of the Tiempo Santo. He follows the movement of the sun and removes pieces of cardboard for each hour and minute that passes. From the beginning to the end of the celebrations, a trio of young girls stands alongside him singing a leitmotif in chorus. Although the marking of time does have a function within the story, the man and the three girls are detached from the other characters and events; therefore, the close-ups focusing on them are strange disruptions of the continuity of the narrative. Similarly, the sequence in which some local people, who seem to be unknown to the rest of the inhabitants, steal a pig from a peasant has a similar effect as it is completely disconnected from the main narrative. Another example is the associative montage of the cow eye, which, like the same device in the subtle neo-surrealism of Julio Medem’s Vacas (1991), interrupts the seamlessness of editing and camerawork in such a way that acts of looking via an unexplained symbolism are foregrounded. While the use of this ‘surrealist’ alteration is limited to a few cases, a technique widely employed is a new scheme of causality in which the magic or the absurd are perceived as normal. The concept that best explains this alternative order is that of ‘magical realism’. I understand magical realism as the representation of magical or marvellous elements within a world that is presented as real and governed by rational logic; in such a world, those elements are not perceived as extraordinary, strange or perturbing.119 Originating in Europe, this well-known concept has been applied to a type of Latin American literary work produced after the 1940s and is nowadays applied to certain literature and cinema

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mostly, although not only, from the so-called ‘Third World’. Llosa’s magical realism consists of, on the one hand, the aforementioned alternative causality and, on the other, of stylistic devices such as reiterations, metaphors, and circularity of space and time, which, as an ensemble, converge to challenge Western notions of reality. As critics have emphasized, magic realism is a matter of symbolic images and belief systems. In his reading of the quintessential magic realist work, Gabriel García Marquez’s Cien años de soledad (1967), Stephen Hart claims that magical realism ‘is born in the gap between the belief systems of two very different groups of people. What for the inhabitant of the “First World” is magical […] is real and unremarkable for the inhabitant of the “Third World”’ and vice versa.120 In effect, from a rationalistic perspective, the things that happen in Manayaycuna are strange: people offer presents to the Virgin without wondering later how these disappear from the isolated town; they also try to make dead people drunk and lock away foreigners without explanation. Time seems to be circular: the plot ends as it begins, with Madeinusa travelling in the truck of el mudo [the Mute], which, at the beginning of the story, takes Salvador to the village. A number of repetitions or leitmotifs appear strategically placed throughout the film, thus creating a sense of déjà vu and/or circularity: the earrings of Madeinusa’s mother, the rat poison and the chicken stock that will eventually kill Don Cayo. La teta asustada also presents ‘odd’ events: Fausta has a potato inserted into her vagina and her nose bleeds when she is frightened, the dead body of her mother is kept in her bedroom for weeks, Aída’s piano plays in spite of being broken, and potatoes and flowers ‘possess’ soul. From a Western rational point of view, the very idea that fear may be transmitted through maternal milk responds to a magical vision of the world. As in the case of Madeinusa, several elements reappear regularly such as the potato and the enormous stairs on top of a hill that lead to Fausta’s house and her mother’s corpse. There is also the inclusion of circularities: Fausta’s journey begins and ends at the hospital. The visual presentation of Fausta’s ‘otherness’ is also informed by magical realist patterns. We see Fausta looking at the world as if she was looking at it for the very first time, wandering about Aída’s house as if she was inside a labyrinth, and touching walls as if they were living bodies. Her movements are noiseless and her presence is almost an ‘absence’; she enters and crosses the spaces framed by the camera as if she was a shadow going through walls. In Llosa’s films, as in many Latin American novels, magic in the thematic domain is related

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to Indigenous culture and belief. Thus, the films convey an image of the Andean world as one in which strange or anomalous events are common. Stylistically, magical realism coexists with what I have called a search for verisimilitude. The two styles should not be regarded as being in conflict; in fact, verisimilitude ‘authenticates’ the representation. Consequently, odd events acquire a degree of ‘truthfulness’ and the existence of such a Peru becomes believable. As a result of its challenge to realism, which is generally considered a European import, magical realism has been defined as a ‘decolonizing’ style. According to Wendy Faris, even if magical realism does not specifically address the issues of decolonization and history, it still ‘portrays hidden or silenced voices’.121 Scholars have also argued that magic realist works unsettle (the Western) reader’s notions of reality. Hart claims that Cien años de soledad ‘prevents the reader from taking up an outsider/insider […] attitude towards the world of the magical. […] [T]he reader is unable to escape from a sense of the world as containing a magical dimension’, which ‘let [the readers’] defences down’, assumingly unsettling their notions of reality either in philosophical or political terms.122 In both of Llosa’s films, where the realist (Western) Weltanschauung and the magical (non-Western) worldview coexist in geographical and cultural proximity, this does not happen given that there are symbolic spaces where (Western) spectators can indeed ‘retreat, a world that is either just real or just magical’123 : for example, in the cases of Salvador and the doctor, if not uncle Lúcido too. Moreover, the display of non-Western lifestyles, beliefs and cosmogonies, while clear on a thematic level, falls within the limitations of magical realism on an aesthetic level. In addition to the safe ‘retreat’ for spectatorial identification, in the films, as in the novel, the ‘implied reader [read spectator] and narrator are, if anything, posited as First World’.124 As Philip Swanson notes in relation to the novel, this subject position invalidates the usual reading of magical realism whereby political meaning is predicated upon its privileging of the ‘developing world’ perspective and instead produces an exoticization of a world unfamiliar to the reader/spectator. Like the novel, the film ‘marks a turn to accessible and, if suggestive, relatively clearly readable narrative’ of cultural difference, but unlike the novel (at least in Swanson’s reading), here the exotic is not ‘assumed as much as it is problematised’.125 Furthermore, critics have even posited that magical realism is actually a kind of narrative primitivism, an ‘aesthetic colonization, reification of

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Indigenous and local cultures in the interests of the continuing superiority of the Eurocentric primitivizer’126 due to its tendency to focus on native or ancient legends, myths and cultural practices through nonrealistic literary patterns. This critique is especially germane to Llosa’s films. For even though she portrays voices that have been silenced both in the cinematic market and in Peruvian society, she invariably does so through a Eurocentric gaze which is not inhibited by the thematic or stylistic magical realism. On the contrary, the gaze is perhaps even reinforced via the link between magical realism and exoticization. By extension, this dovetails with the wider debate over the indiscriminate application of magical realism to depict non-European and non-Western cultures. The issue is whether this ‘decolonizing’ or resistant style is not becoming a predictable one, as it is ‘the most important trend in contemporary fiction’ as Faris wrote already in 2002.127 The issue is, in other words, whether there is a risk that magic or strangeness, seen from a Western perspective, become synonymous with (Indigenous) ethnicity, and exoticization. Hence, as Stephen Slemon pondered with regard to literature, there is, then, a risk that the concept of magical realism, threatens ‘to offer to centralizing genre systems a single locus upon which the massive problem of difference in literary expression can be managed into recognizable meaning in one swift pass’.128

Global Andeanness and the ‘After Life’ of the Films The combination of realism and magical realism, and of the local and the global, have been interpreted as devices producing a tourist’s gaze on the Indigenous cultures and, indeed, on Peru. Speaking of Madeinusa, Monette claims that it is precisely because of the combination of realism and magical realism that the film ‘seems to invite the foreign cinematic tourists to experience the Peruvian Andes on screen as an astonishing but also very authentic world’.129 According to Natalia Ames, Llosa’s films were ‘amongst few media products showing versions of Peru which are available to global audiences, and they cause curiosity about our country’s ways of living and expressing our idiosyncrasy’.130 While Shaw criticises ‘the desire of viewers to consume “authentic”, hidden landscapes and its Quechua people led by a filmmaker in the form of tourist guide’,131 Monette sets the argument in different terms by addressing not only the construction of a generic tourist gaze, but also specific relationship

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between Madeinusa and Peru’s promotional campaigns. Her contention is hence that Madeinusa mirrored the promotional campaigns of Peru’s official tourism board Promperú132 by presenting ‘Peru as a mystical tourist destination where anything can happen’ including the ‘dangerous and effortful styles of tourism’ that are apparently appealing to foreigners coming to Peru.133 Monette views such a relationship in positive terms. Not only did Madeinusa affect the Peruvian tourist industry positively, but it was able to ‘actually contribute to forming new tourist attitudes towards the Andes and the people who inhabit this region’134 principally because it invites cinematic tourists to engage in ‘an intercultural approach that searches to learn about and acknowledge Indigenous forms of identity, modernity and agency’.135 Whether the cultural signs displayed in Madeinusa (and La teta asustada) are judged negatively or positively depends of course on the specific positionings of the spectators, as the debates discussed in this chapter have demonstrated; in this respect, my assessment of Madeinusa’s images of indigeneity is certainly less optimistic than Monette’s. Yet, rather than focusing on the cinematic representations that would sustain or challenge that argument, I am interested in elaborating further on the relationship between Llosa’s cinema and Peruvian tourism; most specifically in the sense of how Llosa’s films (understood as audiovisual events) might have impacted the images of Peru that have circulated globally, beyond cinema. I would argue that the films’ representations and their ‘social life’ (including the Berlinale award ceremony and Solier’s performance; the Oscar nomination; and the debate provoked by them) led to an official endorsement of Llosa’s cinema by politicians and tourism boards, hence affecting some of the dominant images of the ‘Peruvian nation’ that have circulated in Peru and abroad ever since. This is particularly relevant to this book given that something similar occurred with Colombian director Ciro Guerra’s El abrazo de la serpiente and Guatemalan director Jayro Bustamante’s Ixcanul , as I will go on to explain. As already stated, the Berlin ceremony prompted a domestic media endorsement of La teta asustada. Echoing Llosa’s declaration on the stage (‘this is for Peru, for our country’), the day after the ceremony, printed and online media reported the event as a triumph for the country.136 Magaly Solier’s speech and the film’s focus on cultural difference were indeed a perfect fit for contemporary political discourses and promotional tourism campaigns focusing on cultural diversity. After the ceremony, the then Peruvian President Alan García ‘joined the media celebration, and mercantilistly used the film’s

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success as an advertising strategy for his own discourse of the country’s progress’.137 The accessible portrayal of Peruvian society in both of the films examined in this chapter, their official endorsement, and their national and international success has arguably been among the factors that convinced PromPeru to hire Claudia Llosa to create the third installment of the promotional campaign of Marca Perú. Launched in 2011 by PromPeru, Marca Perú has been an extremely successful national branding strategy aimed at promoting investments, exports and tourism. Claudia Llosa’s short video Recordarás Perú [You will remember Peru], released in 2012, was the third instalment of Marca Perú’s promotional campaign and the first aimed at the international market. It transformed Llosa from an ‘auteuse’ into a cultural ambassador for Peru. The narrative of Recordarás Perú is set in 2032: a Spanish executive receives a video recording made by his younger self while travelling in Peru. As Daniella Wurst explains, ‘through a nostalgic longing for an idealized past’ and ‘by revisiting the flashbacks that showcase the immersion into nature and community, the short configures Peru as the platform that will enable a spiritual, emotional, interpersonal reencounter’.138 Peru becomes commodified in the form of a set of accessible experiences: safe adventures, eco-sustainable tourism, cultural experiences of diversity, material and non-material heritage, natural resources and exotic Indigenous people, all easily available to the foreign tourist. The slogan of the video ‘Whatever you might need today, you will find it in Peru’ ‘unapologetically redefines the vision of peruanidad as one prompted by what it can offer to those outside of it’.139 Citizens, tourists, or investors are thus equated and ‘national pride is deposited in what it can offer to others’.140 As Wurst argues convincingly in her analysis of Llosa’s short video, the filmmaker has contributed to a marketization of the national both locally and globally. As I have shown throughout this chapter, the main features of this Peru commodified and ready for global consumption—the celebration and domestication of the other and the portrayal of Peru as an ‘escape from a homogenizing modernity’141 —are already displayed in the films analysed as well as being reinforced through the performance of cultural difference and authenticity carried out during the Berlinale award ceremony. Solier’s performance of authenticity is not in my view something that should be criticized, though; quite the opposite, in fact. What I want to stress is its role in the creation of the ‘audiovisual event’ of Llosa’s film

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and its impact in the film’s social life. Swinton’s gesture of kissing her hand is equally part of this event (Fig. 2.3). Both actions, Solier’s and Swinton’s, became key moments in the construction of Solier’s public persona. Indeed, I would like to end this chapter by emphasizing the important public role she has held since her encounter with Llosa during the pre-production of Madeinusa. In this study of films with Indigenous plots in Indigenous languages, it is important to foreground the visibility and voice that Solier as an artist has given to Quechua Indigenous culture as well as the challenge that she has (re)presented to dominant processes of racialization. Since her cinematic collaboration with Llosa, Solier has become a renowned film

Fig. 2.3 Magaly Solier and Tilda Swinton at the 59th Berlin Film festival award ceremony

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actress, accepting further roles in Peru and internationally, while also returning to her first love of music and becoming equally well-known as a singer. She released her first album Warmi [Woman, in Quechua] in 2009 and her second Coca Quintucha in 2015. Many of the songs included on the albums are sung and recorded in Quechua. Significantly, Solier self-identifies as a campesina [peasant] as well as being an actress and a singer.142 Her public persona challenges and undermines the stereotypes associated with Andeanness. As Montero-Díaz points out, Rather than reproducing typical images of the Andean indigenous campesina in folklorised clothing singing solely ‘indigenous music’, in order to build up cultural capital, Magaly Solier presents herself as a modern, cosmopolitan Andean woman, capable of speaking Quechua while representing Peru on a global stage. This approach enables her to portray her Andeanness horizontally, destabilising the habitual and expected unequal interaction between traditional Limeños and Andeans.143

She has also been an advocate of Indigenous rights, women’s empowerment and the vindication of the Quechua language and culture. The brief speech delivered at the Berlinale, for example, addressed Indigenous women. In recognition of her work in defending and promoting Indigenous languages and music she was nominated a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador in 2017. The global Andeanness embodied by Solier has thus had an important and positive impact on the visibilization of Quechua Indigenous culture in Peru and abroad. This is especially relevant considering that, despite its large Indigenous population, Peru, as Gleghorn wrote in 2017, ‘is generally regarded as out of step with the overall pattern of [Indigenous] film production that has accompanied the rise of the Indigenous movements’ in Latin America since the 1990s, perhaps mirroring the low level of ‘ethnic mobilization in the region’.144 This might have also affected the feelings of belonging and pride of young generations in relation to the native language of their parents and grandparents. According to Raúl Castro Pérez: Peruvians seek universality by raising a symbolic flag to that one distinguishing feature: the Quechua language. For their parents and grandparents, the language was a comparative disadvantage. For the grandchildren,

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Quechua represents a resource that offers greater possibilities for negotiating social status in an intercultural context in which the particular can lead to prominence.145

Notes 1. Vincenzo Bugno (the director of the WCF) explains that this funding scheme promotes international cooperation, supporting cultural diversity and non-mainstream cinema, and privileging films dealing with the legacies of colonialism. As already mentioned (Note 72, Chapter 1), in March 2021, a WCF Day was held with a specific focus on ‘Decolonising Cinema’. See World Cinema Fund, ‘Feb 25, 2021: WCF Day on March 5 With a Focus on “Decolonising Cinema”,’ 71 Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin [Online], February 25, 2021, available at https:// www.berlinale.de/en/news-topics/news/detail_67592.html. 2. ‘El Oso de Berlín rugió en quechua: “La teta asustada” ganó premio de Berlinale’ [Online], February 15, 2009, available at https://archivo.elcomercio.pe/amp/tvmas/television/oso-ber lin-ruge-quechua-teta-asustada-se-llevo-maximo-galardon-berlin ale-noticia-246475. 3. The majority of the songs performed by Solier in the film have been the result of a collaboration between Llosa, who wrote the lyrics, and Solier, who wrote the music. The songs ‘Palomita’ and ‘Jardín’ have been completely written (lyrics and music) by Solier. 4. Kimberly Theidon, Intimate Enemies: Violence and Reconciliation in Peru (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), xiii. 5. Theidon, Intimate Enemies, 43. 6. Theidon, Intimate Enemies, 43–44. 7. Theidon, Intimate Enemies, 44. 8. Theidon, Intimate Enemies, 45. 9. Alexandra Hibbett, ‘The Political Blockages of Peruvian Memory Cinema,’ in Peruvian Cinema of the Twenty-First Century: Dynamic and Unstable Grounds, eds., Cynthia Vich and Sarah Barrow (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 218. 10. Hibbett, ‘The Political Blockages,’ 217.

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11. Gisela Cánepa-Koch, ‘La teta asustada de Claudia Llosa,’ EMisférica 7, No. 1 [Online] (n.d.), available at https://hemi.nyu. edu/hemi/es/e-misferica-71/canepa-koch. 12. Carolina Rueda, ‘Memory, Trauma, and Phantasmagoria in Claudia Llosa’s La teta asustada,’ Hispania 98, No. 3 (September 2016), 460. 13. Douglas J. Weatherford, ‘Populating the Margins: Hope and Healing in Claudia Llosa’s La teta asustada,’ Diálogo 23, No. 1 (Spring 2020), 87. 14. Rebeca Maseda, ‘Indigenous Trauma in Mainstream Peru in Claudia Llosa’s The Milk of Sorrow,’ Dissidences 11, No. 6 (January 2016), 2. 15. Adriana Rojas, ‘Mother of Pearl, Song and Potatoes: Cultivating Resilience in Claudia Llosa’s La teta asustada/Milk of Sorrow (2009),’ Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas 14, No. 3 (2017), 299. 16. See Shaw, ‘European Co-production,’ Cynthia Vich, ‘De estetizaciones y viejos exotismos: apuntes en torno a La teta asustada de Claudia Llosa,’ Revista de crítica literaria latinoamericana 80 (2014), and Gastón Lillo, ‘La teta asustada (Perú, 2009), de Claudia Llosa: ¿memoria u olvido?,’ Revista de crítica literaria latinoamericana XXXVII, No. 73 (2011). 17. Rueda, ‘Memory,’ 455. 18. Bourdieu, quoted in Theidon, Intimate Enemies, 223. 19. Theidon, Intimate Enemies, 145. 20. Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,’ Representations 26 (1989), 7. 21. Rojas, ‘Mother of Pearl,’ 300–301. 22. Rojas, ‘Mother of Pearl,’ 309. 23. Francesca Denegri and Cecilia Esparza, ‘Violencia sexual y romance en el imaginario del Perú contemporáneo,’ in Lucero de Vivanco and María Teresa Johansson, eds., Pasados contemporáneos: acercamientos a los derechos humanos y las memorias en Perú y América Latina (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2019), 168. 24. Julissa Mantilla Falcón, ‘The Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Treatment of Sexual Violence Against Women,’ Human Rights Brief 12, No. 2, available at https://www.cor teidh.or.cr/tablas/r38673.pdf. 25. Denegri and Esparza, ‘Violencia Sexual,’ 168.

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26. Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 5. 27. Hirsch, Postmemory, 5. 28. Hibbett, ‘The Political Blockages.’ 29. Hibbett, ‘The Political Blockages.’ 30. Hibbett, ‘The Political Blockages,’ 218. 31. Hibbett, ‘The Political Blockages,’ 218. 32. Quoted in Iliana Pagán-Teitelbaum, ‘Depiction or Erasure? Violence and Trauma in Contemporary Peruvian Film,’ Continuum 24, No. 1 (February 2010), 172. 33. Jacques Rancière, Sobre políticas estéticas (Barcelona: Universitat Autónoma, 2005), 41. 34. Sarah Barrow, ‘New Configurations for Peruvian Cinema: The Rising Star of Claudia Llosa,’ Transnational Cinemas 4, No. 2 (2013), 202. 35. See Gonzalo Benavente, ‘Madeinperú,’ Quehacer 162, No. 1 (2006), 120–123, available at https://go.gale.com/ps/ano nymous?id=GALE%7CA172635112&sid=googleScholar&v=2. 1&it=r&linkaccess=abs&issn=02509806&p=AONE&sw=w also in http://www.desco.org.pe/recursos/sites/indice/416/1277. pdf; Pilar Roca, “Madeinusa o el insulto hecho cine,” Servindi [Online], available at https://www.servindi.org/node/41254; and Wilfredo Ardito, ‘Madeinusa: Racismo en la pantalla grande,’ La Venganza del Cóndor [Online], October 3, 2009, available at https://lavenganzadelcondor.blogspot.com/2009/10/madein usa-racismo-en-la-pantalla-grande.html. 36. Jon Beasley-Murray, ‘Madeinusa,’ Posthegemony [Online], November 8, 2007, available at http://posthegemony.blogspot. com/2007/11/madeinusa.html. 37. Diana Palaversich, ‘Cultural Dyslexia and the Politics of CrossCultural Excursion in Claudia Llosa’s Madeinusa,’ Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 90, No. 4 (2013). 38. Marie-Eve Monette, ‘Cinematic Tourism in Madeinusa,’ Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 93, No. 5 (2016), 531. 39. Benavente, ‘Madeinperú.’ 40. Mónica Delgado, ‘Madeinusa o el otro tiempo santo,’ Quehacer 162, No. 1 (2006), 117–119.

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41. Juli A. Kroll, ‘Between the “Sacred” and the “Profane”: Cultural Fantasy in Madeinusa by Claudia Llosa,’ Chasqui: Revista de Literatura Latinoamericana 38, No. 2 (2009), 113. 42. Iliana Pagán-Teitelbam, ‘El Glamour en los Andes: la representación de la mujer indígena migrante en el cine peruano,’ Revista Chilena de Antropología Visual 12, No. 1 (2008). 43. Juan Carlos Ubilluz Raygada, ‘¿Nuevos sujetos subalternos? ¡No en la nación cercada!: Del “Informe sobre Uchuraccay” de Mario Vargas Llosa a Madeinusa de Claudia Llosa,’ Iberoamericana 37, No. 10 (2010), 136. 44. Kroll, ‘Cultural Fantasy.’ 45. Ricardo Bedoya, ‘Cine: a espaldas de Cristo,’ El Comercio [Online], September 22, 2006, available at http://elcome rcio.pe/edicionimpresa/html/2006-09-22/ImEcDominical05 82788.html#. 46. Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism, 23. 47. Monette, ‘Cinematic Tourism.’ 48. Núria Vilanova, ‘Post-indigenismo de celuloide: la deconstrucción del imaginario indígena en las películas de Claudia Llosa,’ Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 80, No. 40 (2014), 354. 49. Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism, 137. 50. Portocarrero, G. (2006) ‘“Madeinusa” ¿La imposibilidad en el Perú?,’ Página de Gonzalo Portocarrero [Online], October 5, 2006, available at http://gonzaloportocarrero.blogsome.com/ 2006/10/05/p134. 51. Bedoya, ‘Cine: a espaldas de Cristo.’ 52. Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism, 139. 53. Palaversich, ‘Cultural Dyslexia,’ 497. 54. Kroll, ‘Cultural Fantasy,’ 118. 55. Quoted in Abril Trigo, ‘Shifting Paradigms: From Transculturation to Hybridity: A Theoretical Critique,’ in Unforeseeable Americas: Questioning Cultural Hybridity in the Americas, eds., Rita de Grandis and Zila Bernd (Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000), 103. 56. Fernando Ortiz, Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1978). 57. Bedoya, ‘Cine: a espaldas de Cristo.’

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58. An interesting interpretation of the potato as a ‘tripartite fetish’ is offered by Niall Geraghty in ‘A Tuberous Fetish: The Potato as Protagonist in Claudia Llosa’s La teta asustada (2009),’ The Journal of Romance Studies 21, No. 2 (2021). 59. Clorinda Matto de Turner, Aves sin Nido (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1994), 79. 60. Antonio Cornejo Polar, Literatura y sociedad en el Perú: La novela indigenista (Lima: Lasontay, 1980), 22. 61. Michael Pickering, Stereotyping: The Politics of Representation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 56. 62. Cornejo Polar, Literatura y sociedad, 25. 63. Portocarrero, ‘“Madeinusa”.’ 64. Yasmín López Lenci, ‘La creación de la nación peruana en las revistas culturales del Cusco (1910–1930),’ Revista Iberoamericana LXX, Nos. 208–209 (2004), 699. 65. Zoila Mendoza, Creating Our Own: Folklore, Performance, and Identity in Cuzco, Peru (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 3. 66. Natalia Majluf, ‘Nacionalismo e Indigenismo en el arte americano,’ in Pintura, Escultura y Fotografía en Iberoamérica, Siglos XIX y XX , eds., Ramón Gutiérrez Viñuales y Rodrigo Gutiérrez (Madrid: Cátedra, 1997), 247–258. 67. Quoted in Shearer West, Portraiture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 28. 68. Majluf, ‘Nacionalismo e Indigenismo.’ 69. Luis E. Valcárcel, Tempestad en los Andes (Lima: Populibros, 1963), 42. 70. Mirko Lauer, Andes imaginarios: Discursos del indigenismo 2 (Lima: CBC, 1997), 18. 71. Valcárcel, Tempestad, 42. 72. Lauer, Andes imaginarios. 73. Cornejo Polar, Literatura y sociedad, 16–27. 74. Lauer, Andes imaginarios, 21. 75. Claudia Llosa, ‘Interview,’ 2006, Madeinusa, DVD, Oberón Cinematográfica, Spain. 76. Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism, 179. 77. William Rowe, Ensayos Arguedianos (Lima: Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 1996), 53.

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78. William Rowe and Vivian Schelling, Memory and Modernity: Popular Culture in Latin America (London: Verso, 1994), 68. 79. José María Arguedas, Señores e indios (Buenos Aires: Arca/Calicanto, 1976), 121. 80. José María Arguedas, Canto Kechwa (Lima: Club del libro peruano, 1938). 81. Rowe and Schelling, Memory and Modernity, 131. Kroll sees quite critically the religious and cultural syncretism in the film and suggests that themes such as ‘the reification of religious syncretism, the confusion of incomplete modernity, the prevalence of cultural figures such as the siren, the study of ritual use of alcohol and religious symbol-objects […] the dichotomy between sacre and profane [configure an array of] themes from European myth of the era of Atlantic exploration and images of cultural alterity that have characterized Western perspectives on Andean indigeneity’. Kroll, ‘Cultural Fantasy,’ 113. 82. José María Arguedas, ‘El Ayla,’ in Relatos completos (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1974), 200–206. 83. Pagán-Teitelbam, ‘El Glamour en los Andes,’ 8. 84. Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism, 178. 85. Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism, 179. 86. See Neil Young, ‘Rotterdam 2006: Part Six (Including Claudia Llosa’s “Madeinusa”),’ Neil Young’s Film Lounge [Online], February 14–15, 2005, available at http://www.jigsawlounge. co.uk/film/reviews/rotterdam-2006-part-six-including-claudiaLlosa-s-madeinusa/; Boyd Van Hoeij, ‘The Milk of Sorrow,’ Variety [Online], February 14, 2009, available at http://www. variety.com/index.asp?layout=print_review&reviewid=VE1117 939676&categoryid=31&query=the+milk+of+sorrow. 87. Llosa, ‘Interview.’ 88. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff, eds., Critical Terms for Art History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 118. 89. Nelson and Shiff, Critical Terms, 119. 90. Jon Beasley-Murray, ‘Subalternidad, traición y fuga: tres películas recientes del Perú,’ in Miradas al margen: cine y subalternidad en América Latina y el Caribe, ed. Luis Duno-Gottberg (Caracas: Fundación Cinemateca Nacional, 2008), 386.

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91. Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avantgarde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), 229. 92. Gustavo Buntix, ed., E. P. S. Huayco: Documentos (Lima: MALI, 2005), 80. 93. Delgado, ‘Madeinusa,’ 118. 94. Delgado, ‘Madeinusa,’ 118. 95. Quoted in Christopher Pinney, ‘Anotaciones desde la superficie de la imagen. Fotografía, poscolonialismo y modernidad vernacular,’ in Fotografía, antropología y colonialismo (1845–2006), ed. Juan Naranjo (Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo Gili, 2006), 294. 96. Rowe and Schelling, Memory and Modernity, 59. 97. Fiorella Montero Díaz, ‘White cholos? Discourses Around Race, Whiteness and Lima’s Fusion Music,’ in Cultures of Anti-Racism in Latin America and the Caribbean, eds. Peter Wade, James Scorer, and Ignacio Aguiló (London: Institute of Latin American Studies, 2019), 173. 98. See Montero Díaz, ‘White cholos?’. 99. The music of the wedding scenes is also known as cumbia peruana. The relationship between chicha and cumbia peruana is complex. For many scholars, chicha is a subgenre of the cumbia peruana (an umbrella term which would encompass different types of cumbia: the chicha, the cumbia norteña, the cumbia psicodélica and the cumbia sureña) although for others it is the other way around, and for yet others, they refer to the same genre. The differentiation is also simply related to the terminology: while the term cumbia peruana was employed from the late 1960s and early 1970s to name the new genres, the term chicha was introduced in 1977 and became popular the following decade. See Montero Díaz, ‘White cholos?’ and also Walter Espinoza, ‘La cumbia y la chicha: ¿cuáles son las diferencias entre ambos ritmos musicales?,’ La República, August 26, 2020. The film’s score includes iconic songs of Peruvian chicha and cumbia music such as ‘Elsa’, ‘Horizontes’ and ‘Caminito serrano’ by Los destellos, a group from Lima’s Rimac district which is considered the pioneer of those genres. Los destellos was founded in 1966 and dissolved in the early 1980s. After the death of its founder

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Enrique Delgado, his sister Enid Delgado put the band back together in 1996 under the name Los destellos de Enid Delgado. The songs that are in the film are performed by Los destellos de Enid Delgado, who appear in one of the wedding sequences. The song ‘Caminito serrano’ was part of the 1974 LP album Los destellantes and was also launched as a single 45 rpm record. This song is credited as ‘Cariñito serrano’ in the film credits, a title which seems to combine ‘Caminito serrano’, by Los destellos, and another famous cumbia song, ‘Cariñito’, by Peruvian band Los hijos del sol. As I will explain, in the late 2000s, when La teta asustada was made, cumbia and chicha music were undergoing a process of revitalization and appropriation by upper-class youth and musical groups. 100. Arturo Quispe Lázaro, ‘La “Cultura Chicha” en el Perú,’ Construyendo Nuestra Interculturalidad 1, No. 1, May 6, 2004, available at www.interculturalidad.org. 101. Abril Trigo, ‘Shifting Paradigms,’ 150. 102. Montero Díaz, ‘Turning Things Around? From White Fusion Stars with Andean Flavour to Andean Fusion Stars with White Appeal,’ Popular music 37, No. 3 (2018), 426. 103. An example is the well-known band Bareto. Montero Díaz, ‘Turning Things Around?,’ 426. 104. Montero Díaz, ‘Turning Things Around?,’ 426. 105. Vich, ‘De estetizaciones y viejos exotismos,’ 334. 106. Vich, ‘De estetizaciones, 338. 107. Vich, ‘De estetizaciones, 338. 108. Stephanie Dennison, ‘Debunking Neo-Imperialism or Reaffirming Neo-Colonialism? The Representation of Latin America in Recent Co-Productions,’ Transnational Cinemas 4, No. 2 (2013), 193. 109. Shaw, ‘European Co-Production.’ 110. Shaw, ‘European Co-Production,’ 91. 111. Dennison ‘Debunking Neo-Imperialism,’ 186. 112. Dennison ‘Debunking Neo-Imperialism,’ 186. 113. Falicov, ‘Cine en Construcción,’ 254. See also Campos, ‘Film (Co) Production’ and ‘La América Latina de “Cine en Construcción.”’ 114. Quoted in Falicov, ‘Cine en Construcción,’ 263–264.

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115. Miriam Ross, ‘The Film Festival as Producer: Latin American Films and Rotterdam Hubert Bals Fund,’ Screen 52, No. 2 (2011), 264. 116. Shaw, ‘European Co-Production,’ 96. 117. Dolores Tierney, New Transnationalisms in Contemporary Latin American Cinemas (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2018), 64. 118. Tierney, New Transnationalisms, 21. 119. Ana María Platas Tasende, Diccionario de términos literarios (Madrid: Espasa, 2000), 692. 120. Stephen M. Hart and Wen-chin Ouyang, A Companion to Magical Realism (Martlesham: Boydell & Brewer, 2005), 3. 121. Wendy Faris, ‘The Question of the Other: Cultural Critiques of Magical Realism,’ Janus Head 5, No. 2 (2002), 107. 122. Hart and Ouyang, Magical Realism, 4. 123. Hart and Ouyang, Magical Realism, 4. 124. Philip Swanson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Gabriel García Márquez (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 58. 125. Swanson, Gabriel García Márquez, 58–59. 126. Faris, ‘The question, 104. 127. Faris, ‘The question, 101. 128. Stephen Slemon, ‘Magic Realism as Postcolonial Discourse,’ in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, eds. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy Faris (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 409. 129. Monette, ‘Cinematic Tourism,’ 532. 130. Natalia Ames, in Barrow, ‘New Configurations,’ 203. 131. Shaw, ‘European Co-Production.’ 132. Created in 1993. A division of MINCETUR, the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Tourism in charge of tourism promotional strategy in the international market. 133. Monette, ‘Cinematic Tourism,’ 533–534. 134. Monette, ‘Cinematic Tourism,’ 535. 135. Monette, ‘Cinematic Tourism,’ 546. 136. Ricardo Bedoya, ‘Dos “performances” de Magaly Solier: construyendo una imagen cultural,’ Contratexto, No. 26 (2016), 72. 137. Vich, ‘De estetizaciones,’ 341.

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138. Daniella Wurst, ‘The Promise of Authenticity: Doing and Undoing the Cinematic Tourist Gaze in Claudia Llosa’s Short Films,’ in Peruvian Cinema, eds., Cynthia Vich and Sarah Barrow, 172. 139. Wurst, ‘The Promise,’ 171. 140. Wurst, ‘The Promise,’ 174. 141. Wurst, ‘The Promise,’ 172. 142. Montero Díaz, ‘Turning Things Around?,’ 437. 143. Montero Díaz, ‘Turning Things Around?,’ 437. 144. Gleghorn, ‘Indigenous Filmmaking,’ 179. 145. Castro Pérez, 2003, quoted in Bedoya, ‘Dos performances,’ 77.

CHAPTER 3

Realist Modes of Production and the Politics of Memory: Ixcanul (2015) and La Llorona (2019)

In 2015, six years after La teta asustada received the Golden Bear at the Berlinale, Claudia Llosa returned to the festival as a member of the international jury led by Darren Aronofsky.1 That year, the panel of judges awarded the Alfred Bauer Silver Bear2 to the Guatemalan Jayro Bustamante for his debut work Ixcanul [Volcano]. Like La teta asustada, Ixcanul is a transnational co-production with an Indigenous plot, Indigenous actors and is spoken in an Indigenous language, the Kaqchikel. In fact, there are a series of interesting thematic convergences between the works of the two filmmakers: both directors explore coming-of-age narratives, Indigenous lives in rural areas, the encounter of the traditional and the modern as well as the legacies of war in post-conflict societies, and both have sought to blend the local with the universal. More remarkably, the work of both filmmakers has come to be identified with generating nothing less than a paradigmatic shift in the national film culture in their respective countries. With regard to Peru, Llosa’s transnational success has arguably contributed to the recent rise in the production of inter/cultural films screening the Indigenous experience; it is also reasonable to suggest that the visibility and global reception of La teta asustada has been among the factors leading to the establishing of the current state funding scheme that supports cinema in Indigenous languages.3 Moreover, the symbolic significance of the ‘cultural worthiness’ of the Quechua-speaking actors

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. C. D’Argenio, Indigenous Plots in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93914-4_3

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Fig. 3.1 María Mercedes Coroy, María Telón and Jayro Bustamante at Ixcanul press conference during the 65th Berlin Film Festival

on the global screen afforded by her films should not be underestimated (Fig. 3.1). As for Bustamante’s work, Ixcanul was the ‘most successful case of an art-house Central American film to date’4 and the second Guatemalan film ever to be submitted to the Academy Awards. Not only did the film’s success offer unprecedented international visibility to the Kaqchikel population, but also to a national film industry that was practically nonexistent: there were no schools, funding bodies, distribution companies or cooperation agreements. This precariousness meant that, Bustamante, like Llosa, had to seek financial support abroad. He applied for a private loan in France and received an initial limited amount of funding from Cinergia, a ‘Central American version of Ibermedia’5 which located the film on the international festival circuit. Ixcanul was then produced through cooperation between the French company Tu vas voir (co-producer of Walter Salles’ global hit The Motorcycle Diaries ) and Bustamante’s own La casa de producción. The film’s rough cut reached the San Sebastian Cine en producción Programme in 2014 and then secured a post-production grant

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from France’s CNC World Cinema Support fund. As had happened with Llosa’s film, Ixcanul would go on to win a plethora of prizes after the Berlinale. This international and domestic recognition proved to be the catalyst for Bustamante’s initiatives to support independent filmmaking in his country more generally, as I will explain. Furthermore, again in a manner reminiscent of Llosa’s experience in Peru, Bustamante was made Ambassador of tourism by the Guatemalan Institute for Tourism (INGUAT) in 2018 and has since contributed to a guide for cinematic and touristic locations. In the light of the filmmaker’s success on the global stage, the Guatemalan state had clearly taken notice of cinema’s potential for attracting foreign capital through tourism. More recently, Bustamante also directed the project Guatemala tiene algo que decirte [Guatemala has something to tell you], a television series sponsored by the Guatemalan bank Banco industrial which showcases the iconic places and peoples of Guatemala for the domestic audience with a view to fostering a patriotic love of the country and national pride. Importantly, just as Madeinusa had launched Magaly Solier’s career as an actress, Ixcanul proved to be the springboard for the international career of the young Kaqchikel-speaking María Mercedes Coroy. Following her cinematic debut in 2015 at the age of seventeen, Coroy has acted alongside Julianne Moore in Bel Canto (2018), played the starring role in the Mexican TV series La Malinche (2018), appeared in one of the episodes of the Guatemala tiene algo que decirte series and, most recently, starred in Bustamante’s third film, La Llorona (2019), which I discuss below. Supported by funding schemes associated with European film festivals, the international success of Ixcanul would also serve as an influential platform for other socially committed cinematic work undertaken by Bustamante and his production company. Indeed, it is this appeal to social commitment that distinguishes Bustamante from Llosa. More specifically, Bustamante displays a different type of engagement with the Guatemalan national cinema industry, cultural sector and societal issues, from the engagement evidenced in Llosa’s works. Hence, I would contend that it is precisely this notion of Bustamante’s broader, ‘more committed’ engagement which needs to be considered when assessing the way in which his films approach the question of indigeneity. In this chapter, I am particularly interested, therefore, in exploring how films made by nonIndigenous filmmakers such as Bustamante might mitigate the ‘burden’ of representing indigeneity from a non-Indigenous site of enunciation and how fictional cinema can fulfil a socio-political function in the public

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sphere. My argument is twofold. First, I argue that a ‘realist mode of production’ and the social commitment of La casa de producción allow Bustamante to mitigate the exoticization displayed in Ixcanul ; secondly, via my analysis of Bustamante’s most recent work La Llorona, I argue that the filmmaker and his crew succeed in creating a ‘witness’ spectator that is called upon to interrogate the Guatemalan state’s promotion of an official politics of accountability and memory. Ultimately, my discussion of the two films will demonstrate that the team behind La casa de producción employs ethical production strategies in conjunction with marketable film registers to make successful interventions of dissent in the social sphere.

Ixcanul Like most of the films under consideration in this book, Ixcanul dovetails with the notion of ‘global art-house aesthetics’. Luis Armando Arteaga’s ‘lush’ cinematography of ‘static, colour-saturated […] highly stylized deep-focus compositions’6 foregrounding the senses via intimacy and touch is accompanied by a local mise-en-scène of, for the majority of the film, uncontaminated nature, dominated by the looming Volcano (it is in fact the Pacaya Volcano, in the municipalities of Escuintla and Amatitlán). The character-driven plot revolves around the coming-of-age of María (Coroy), a Kaqchikel girl who lives with her parents Juana (María Telón) and Manuel (Manuel Antún) on a remote coffee plantation at the foot of the volcano and has been married off to Ignacio (Justo Lorenzo), the owner of the plantation and also Manuel’s boss. The film is divided into three acts that shift between a contemplative mode to a fast-paced style. Such aesthetic change is mirrored by a move from a more conventional to a more original mise-en-scène of indigeneity. The first two acts display, respectively, the marginalization and exploitation faced on a daily basis by Kaqchikel peasants in remote rural areas, and the female solidarity between mother and daughter who manage to navigate dominant gender oppression; these initial sections also display cultural elements and the intergenerational transmission of Indigenous knowledge. In the first act, María, who remains silent for most of the film, decides to lose her virginity to the young Pepe (Marvin Coroy) in the hope of escaping with him to the USA; she is, though, left by Pepe on the plantation, alone and impregnated by the youngster thus facing the impossibility of both emigrating and marrying. The second act is dominated by a tender mother–daughter ‘sorority’ epitomized by the mise-en-scène of the women’s naked bodies

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in the temazcal, a relationship that is both affective and cultural since Juana passes on her Indigenous knowledge to María. Drawing on such knowledge, the two women try to induce María to abort naturally so that she can still marry Ignacio, but their attempts are unsuccessful as María only ends up being bitten by a snake and taken to hospital. In the third and final act, the Spanish-speaking nurses, doctors and possibly Ignacio conspire to oblige María to give the baby up for adoption while the whole family is convinced that the newborn has died. Hence, this last part of the film constitutes, on the one hand, a socio-political denunciation of the manner in which child abduction is facilitated by a combination of institutions, the language of officialdom, print technology and the law, and, on the other hand, represents an act of resistance on the part of the subalternized subject. María, no longer mumbling words, but speaking her mind, eventually discovers the truth thanks to her resilience, although the family, and Juana in particular, will confront the wall of literacy and corruption behind the country’s trafficking of children. After its release, the film generated a debate that unfolded along similar lines to those discussed in the previous chapter regarding Madeinusa and La teta asustada. Some commentators praised the film’s denunciation of the racialization and marginalization of the Kaqchikel peasants in Guatemala while others took issue with the film’s exotic and conventional representation of subalternized groups. In a compelling analysis of the film, Amanda Álfaro Córdoba posits that Ixcanul gives voice and agency to the Kaqchikel population and at the same time exposes the barriers Indigenous people face in today’s Guatemala: The Casa de Producción and Bustamante bring her [María’s] voice into the mise-en-scène in the same manner as they observe the context in which María’s and Juana’s voices have clashed against the institutions paralysing them. María’s voice gives her speech as she is seen to disagree with the patriarchal establishment.7

Several other critics have highlighted that the film lays bare the discrimination faced by Kaqchikel culture on a daily basis. For Dante Liano, Ixcanul ‘restores our awareness of inequality, oppression and injustice’ in Guatemala8 ; for Michelle Warren and Sonja H. Bickford, the film is a denunciation of the inequalities experienced by Guatemalan Indigenous peoples and of how these are ‘inextricably tied to the market demands placed on them by the city’.9

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Ixcanul ’s portrayal of indigeneity is not, however, unproblematic. While Carolyn Fornoff argues that the film offers a ‘specific and nuanced portrait of indigeneity in Guatemala today’,10 and Alfaro Córdoba believes that the film ‘stages specific references to the Mayan cosmovision’,11 both aspects have been criticized by Indigenous commentators. Maya anthropologist Sandra Xinico Batz maintains that the film typifies the Indigenous peoples as lo indígena [‘the Indigenous’] as well as reinforcing common stereotypes such as poverty, alcoholism, machismo and monolingualism. She also criticizes what she sees as the film’s missed opportunities: The ‘rural’ life that is shown is associated to poverty and, in that sense, it is not given the dimension of a way of life that is different or even of a different conception of life itself. In addition to the aspects of male chauvinism and poverty that are prominent in the ‘drama’, the film has not focused its attention on scenes which I think could have made a compelling contribution to the debate; for example, the scene where men and women sing together in Kaqchikel while they harvest the coffee beans on the plantation.12

Along the same lines, the non-governmental organization Oxlajuj Aj claims that the film has construed the Kaqchikel as ‘an avatar for Indigenous people’ and presented problems of the whole country (emigration, arranged marriages, teen pregnancy, machismo, theft of infants, extreme poverty) as issues specific only to Indigenous people. The film, for them, ‘denigrates’ Maya Kaqchikel cultures and offers ‘an outsider’s perspective on Kaqchikel life’.13 Xinico Batz also criticizes the film’s neorealism: she maintains that Ixcanul presents itself partly as a testimonio (since it fictionalizes a real episode of child abduction) and that it owes its success to the ethnic material it handles.14 This same idea is echoed by Julia González who states that its triumph is due to the local community that ‘gives [the film its] meaning’.15 Underlying these comments is an interpretation of Bustamante’s direction as a neocolonial gesture of cultural appropriation, a critique that has been made with respect to both Llosa’s cinema and the very category of world cinema, as I previously indicated. This debate reveals how relevant the politics of spectatorship is in films dealing with the legacies of colonialism. The fact that the film seems to be praised by non-Indigenous commentators and critiqued by Indigenous ones mirrors the more recent debate provoked by Roma, by Cuarón. The

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reception of Roma was overwhelmingly positive both in film and scholarly circles. The very few critical voices came from Indigenous activists and scholars. Cherokee scholar Joseph M. Pierce’s argument was particularly persuasive: for him, Roma ‘turns Indigenous pain into the condition of possibility of our existence as objects of a history that will never be ours’.16 These polarizations bring to the fore the ‘situational nature’ of spectatorship17 and of scholarly practice too. Cinema ‘turns public spectatorship into a discursive battle zone, where members of the public actively negotiate “looking relations”’18 and this applies both to ‘colonized spectatorship’ (spectators belonging to populations who have been historically subjects of colonization), and Western spectators who consume images of alterity. It is worth examining this latter aspect further. Specifically, I would like to assess the extent to which the film presents an exotic image of Kaqchikel culture and, bringing together current debates in anthropology and film studies, ponder how we can ‘read’ the exotic in contemporary cinema. For if Alfaro Córdoba states that the film decolonizes the Indigenous subaltern via character development (through the final struggle of Juana and María to find out the truth regarding the baby), narrative/mise-en-scène (which render Maya knowledge and culture) and production strategies (the cosmopolitan identity of the film crew undermines the ladino-Maya hierarchy dominant in Guatemalan society), it is also nonetheless true that there are instances whereby the film casts predictable repertoires of indigeneity. In other words, it also enacts more controversial acts of looking between the Indigenous actors and the non-Indigenous crew and between the Indigenous characters on-screen and the non-Indigenous spectators. While reviewers have praised the film’s articulation of the modernity vs tradition binary in terms of the Indigenous isolation and ‘lack’ (of electricity, running water, means of transportation) as well as the depiction of Indigenous knowledge and language as exploitable elements,19 the plot is still partially inscribed within the conventional trope of a clash of cultures and thus, perpetuates the ethnocentric roots of the binary. As Debra Castillo states: The entire visual and ideological field seems bound up in a very conventional imaginary construct of indigeneity, featuring the community’s distance from any of the conventional markers of modernity by highlighting the traditions that handicap them [...]. It is, in this sense, a story

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that could have been told in the nineteenth century —or the sixteenth— with almost no variation on the familiar shape and formulaic constructions of the indigenista morality tale.20

Likewise, the elimination of any signs of hybridity from the mise-en-scène, as revealed by Castillo, conceals the real negotiations between modern and traditional entities existing in the region.A conventional repertoire of indigeneity is also displayed in relation to Indigenous exploitation. The scenes showing coffee pickers exploited by minimal wages and liquor debts, for example, add little to the stories of previous narratives such as the renowned testimonio Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia [translated in English as I, Rigoberta Menchú] by Maya activist Rigoberta Menchú.21 The conventional nature of the film’s depiction of indigeneity is significant if we consider that the remit of the Alfred Bauer prize was to recognize films that opened ‘new perspectives on art’, but what is more relevant to my discussion is the extent to which it reinforces exoticism. In effect, Castillo’s criticism that the film’s ‘starkly beautiful remote and unfamiliar landscapes […] equally unfamiliar and aesthetically pleasing beliefs, customs, and daily practices’ and silences of communal rural labour speak to the spectator’s romantic longing for ‘accessible, authentic exoticism’ seems justifiable22 ; furthermore, the film’s exoticism matches the bourgeois cinephile’s desire for radical alterity discussed in the previous chapter (Fig. 3.2). That said, it should also be noted that there are moments in which the film counters such a conventional exoticizing gaze. At plot level, for example, the female characters are nuanced and multilayered. María is submissive, but also curious, autonomous and exert agency: ‘she smiles, masturbates, searches for Pepe, undresses […], digs up the coffin where her baby is meant to be and finally expresses her opinion at two crucial moments in the film’.23 Juana is assertive despite the dominant patriarchal structure: she decides when she wants to have sex; she takes care of her daughter’s pregnancy; she takes the decision that the family needs to leave the plantation; she faces the Guatemalan authority looking for the baby. Moreover, the episode of legally enforced child trafficking represents aesthetic and thematic originality. Not only does this episode disrupt the conventional link between indigeneity, nostalgia and past but it also complicates the tradition/modernity binary ‘remind[ing] us that what we call “tradition” and what we call “modernity” cross each other continually and engage in direct or slipwise negotiations across a range of practices,

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Fig. 3.2 María and Juana in a still from Ixcanul

which in this film are generally mediated through the material technology of print and the authority of paper’.24 It is not, however, by means of plot and representational regimes that the film mitigates exoticization most significantly, but rather through its ‘realist mode of production’, borrowing this notion from Nagib. Realist modes of production ‘rely on the physical engagement on the part of crew and cast with the profilmic event; the near-identity between the cast and their roles; real location shooting; the audiovisual medium’s inherent indexical property’25 and reproduce social and historical reality. Through a realist mode of production, Nagib claims, ‘reality exists and can be inflected and improved through film’.26 Considering from this angle, it can be argued that the production strategies of Ixcanul produced

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real relationships which undermined the power dynamics and cultural voyeurism implicit to the exotic mise-en-scène. The mode of production of Ixcanul relied on collaboration between the crew and actors as well as with the Indigenous inhabitants of the region where the film was shot; the result was a series of intercultural encounters and newly produced friendships. Bustamante has explained that the script originated by a story of child trafficking from the area surrounding the Atitlán Lake Basin where he grew up, told to his mother who used to work there as a health officer. The original María (the name of the mother whose child was stolen) approved of the film but did not want to take part in it. The final script was informed by collaborative work with local people carried out both in the region of the Atitlán Lake Basin and in the village of Santa María de Jesús in the department of Sacatepéquez. With the support of social workers, the filmmaker held theatre workshops with local women to learn more about their views on the issues tackled in the film. He then met María Telón after seeing her performing, and selected her for the role of Juana. Telón was part of a socially committed theatre group performing in Santa María de Jesús and brought the crew to her village where they were welcomed by a vibrant community with a strong tradition of folkloric and cultural performances. The casting, training and translations took place there in collaboration with the Kaqchikel locals, thus involving a practice of interculturalidad. Justo Lorenzo, who plays Ignacio and is a Spanish and Kaqchikel teacher, translated the script into Kaqchikel with his wife. Clearly, in the films under consideration here, translations are powerful sites of Indigenous agency whereby the subaltern is able to speak—to employ’s Spivak famous notion—both literally and metaphorically. Although this agency sometimes lacks recognition in the film credits (although that is not the case here)27 and is inevitably somewhat attenuated by the Spanish subtitles that reduce the difference of the Kaqchikel symbolic system when adapting it to that of the Romance languages, it remains nevertheless a fundamental act that allows some degree of Indigenous empowerment. Moreover, the crew replaced Western training techniques with Indigenous rituals to such an extent that they eventually ended up using those that appear in the film as relaxation techniques instead of yoga. As Alfaro Córdoba points out, this interaction was facilitated by the fact that the crew was cosmopolitan, and hence, evaded the ladino-Maya conflictive hierarchy that has historically shaped Guatemalan society.28 This is relevant considering the challenges and exclusion (in politics,

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health, jobs access, salary, housing and education) faced by Indigenous groups in the country despite the fact that Guatemala has adopted the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.29 It is worth noting in that respect that the narrative about the film’s production articulated in interviews is not fashioned around the notion of a ‘magical’ experience (as was the case in films like El abrazo de la serpiente), but around real experiences.30 Furthermore, once the film was released in Guatemala, La casa de producción organized screenings in many towns including San Vicente de Pacaya where the film was shot, as a way of thanking the local community. The friendships developed during the production of the film between the filmmaker and the two actresses is a further, perhaps the most important yet less visible, way in which exoticization is undermined. Production, hence, is indeed as Nagib states, a way where reality is re/produced and can be improved. The problem lies in the minimization at best, and erasure at worst, of local agency and voices by mainstream media and marketing strategies. Such minimization, however, does not efface the ‘real’ interactions between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people and the complex negotiations between Kaqchikel speakers and the cinematic ‘globalized, integrated, and technologically sophisticated network’.31 The exoticization mentioned by some commentators has thus been countered in several ways and perhaps even manipulated as a strategy to achieve global visibility or, more pessimistically, as ‘a marketing tool for survival’.32 For films dealing with citizenship rights and the legacies of genocide, such as Ixcanul and La Llorona, made in a country that produces only two or three movies per year and where cinematic productions are watched by nine per cent of the population, international visibility does not grant only symbolic capital, but material benefits such as media coverage and public endorsement, which have repercussions for the films’ domestic distribution and generate support for related social projects. Regarding this, since Ixcanul ’s release, the filmmaker has shown commitment to human rights culture, social advocacy through media and the development of a national cinema.33 Bustamante’s Guatemala Citybased La casa de producción, founded with his mother Marina Peralta in 2009, supports the production and distribution of independent filmmaking. In 2017, the filmmaker created La Sala de Cine in the Centro Cultural Miguel Ángel Asturias,34 a free space to watch alternative auteur cinema. His Fundación Ixcanul works to generate social impact and

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change through film and to build a cinema culture in a country where film distribution is overwhelmingly dominated by Hollywood blockbusters. Bustamante’s and La casa de producción’s commitment in the social sphere invites us to think about the possible outcomes of the cinematic uses of the exotic. In addition to pondering whether the film reaffirms or counters exoticism, then, I will present Ixcanul as an emblematic case study of how we might read exoticism in (and beyond) cinema. Recent debates in film studies and also anthropology have sought to rehabilitate the exotic by emphasizing its versatility. The exotic, understood as the ethnocentric ‘feeling which diversity stirs in us’,35 is usually considered in pejorative terms, bounded to colonial endeavours and imperialist nostalgia as well as Western longings for the authenticity ‘ruined’ by the colonial contact. As such, it has lots in common with the early twentiethcentury artistic search for ‘original’ and ‘authentic’ ‘primitivism’ and with the current narratives of primitivism utilized in tourism circuits. However, scholars are contending that exoticism is not inevitably monolithic and unidirectional, but can be a polyvalent and multidirectional site of potential agency36 as well as a strategy to reach global audiences and/or to fulfil social or political goals. Daniela Berghahn argues that such is the case in Ciro Guerra’s El abrazo de la serpiente, a film that is also the focus of my next chapter. Berghahn posits that exoticism can be a ‘vehicle to capture metropolitan audiences’ interest and to ensure that the films’ ethic-political agendas are effectively communicated’.37 While I would choose to diverge from such a reading in the case of Guerra’s film, I do think Berghahn’s conceptualization of cinematic exoticism can be applied quite productively to Ixcanul . In order to further my argument, I shall draw on recent studies from the anthropology of tourism. As Fabiola Mancinelli argues in her analysis of Western tourism in Madagascar, tour operators create an ambivalent ‘primitivist narrative’ which relies not only on the usual elements of the primitivist discourse (grammar of lacking, magical thinking and so on) but also, and mostly, on ‘alternative lifestyles, authenticity’ and ‘images of lost harmonies and life in contact with nature’.38 The tourists’ desires for experiences of radical alterity are thus fulfilled through the construction of an exotic image of the natives mediated, ultimately, by the Westerner’s own nostalgia. As Mancinelli explains, ‘in tourism “the primitive” comes to hold the characteristics of something ambiguously fascinating, an alterity that can be glanced at and experienced through the relatively comfortable and safe setting created by mediators’.39 Mancinelli’s description of the touristic

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encounter can be transposed to the cinematic encounter between the (Westernized) spectator and the film. Watching a film can be an ‘experience of the new and unexpected’, of ‘“going native” in the confines of a movie theatre’, as Bill Nichols noted.40 Like overseas adventures, films are a way of encountering cultures that are not our own; the cinephile festival goers ‘[l]ike the anthropological fieldworker, or, more casually, the tourist, [are] invited to submerge [them]selves in an experience of difference, entering strange worlds, hearing unfamiliar languages’.41 The problem with this fascination is that it ‘remain largely ethnocentric, as reflection[s] of a hierarchy, of knowledge and power. It results from decisions taken within established “regimes of value”, about what deserves to be preserved and what, on the other hand, should be lost’.42 Nevertheless, Mancinelli’s study demonstrates that there is also potential for agency in the touristic encounter and that concerned Western tourists might challenge the primitivist narrative and its implications. I am particularly interested in the notion of ‘philanthropic repercussion’, a social engagement whereby ‘the voyeurism implicit in the tourists’ gaze is neutralized and its object is converted into something that is not passively gazed upon, but can be, to a certain extent, interacted with, through a sort of engagement’.43 Equipped with the capacity for mediating images and experiences of radical difference, and for visualizing unfamiliar worlds and languages, cinema is particularly ‘susceptible’ to the production of (auto)exoticization. Elsaesser warns that ‘world cinema’ films are particularly at risk of ‘conducting a form of auto-ethnography, and promoting a sort of self-exoticization, in which the ethnic, the local or the regional expose themselves under the guise of self-expression, to the gaze of the benevolent other’.44 That said, there is clearly an even greater and more conflictive risk at stake in the inter/cultural productions under consideration in this book: for if world cinema’s ‘invariably implies the look from outside’, in heterogenous films the auto-exoticization might go hand-inhand with processes of appropriation of the respective countries’ own ‘internal others’. Yet filmmaking, like tourism, can become the site of more complex negotiations and engagements with the social realities of marginalized groups. As demonstrated in the previous chapter, the exotic can, for example, be employed as a strategy to reach global audiences, to visibilize local injustices, and to attract domestic support for socially committed work within and beyond cinema. According to Mancinelli,

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the tourists’ and mediators’ philanthropy is the other side of the primitivist narrative, ‘arising when an imaginary becomes embodied into a lived experience’.45 In the case of cinematic productions, this would apply to the encounter between the filmmaker and the cast/other Indigenous people (I will examine this type of encounter in Chapter 6). Just like ethical tourism, ethical realist modes of production can be equated with a ‘socially responsible’ activity. Furthermore, in the case of Bustamante, such modes of production led to ‘practical outcomes’ often absent in the tourist experience, not least of all because the success of Ixcanul allowed Bustamante to carry out a number of projects. In addition to those already mentioned, particularly significant are the activities of the Fundación Ixcanul, which have thus far included an ‘itinerant cinema’ that brings social cinema to urban and rural areas with no access to films; ‘Ixcanul female children’, a project on sexual health and reproductive rights supported by foreign and state bodies; workshops on cinema aimed at aspirant professionals and educational institutions; and a cinema forum with talks on social cinema and film industry. Interestingly, among the talks listed on the Fundación’s website, are those by Coroy (‘Empowerment of Mayan youth’) and Telón (‘From theatre to cinema’) as well as Bustamante himself (‘Cinema production and low budget’). Thus, Ixcanul , unlike most of the films discussed here, seems to have generated real impact and ‘philanthropic repercussion’ within the limits, of course, of its own human rights approach and non-Indigenous site of enunciation. Coroy and Telón have played a key role in such endeavours since their first encounter with Bustamante. Their interviews featured in Guatemalan media during and after the shooting of Ixcanul are powerful interventions on the situation of Indigenous women. Both actresses saw their participation in the film as a possible source of inspiration for women. In her interviews, Telón strives to motivate Indigenous women and, specifically, Indigenous widows like herself, against succumbing to low self-esteem or difficult conditions. They both feel and voice a responsibility as Kaqchikel women in a country in which the Indigenous population is completely unrepresented in the media. While Telón has explicitly addressed the racism still dominant in Guatemalan society, Coroy has carried out an interesting set of symbolic empowering gestures. In an interview regarding her performance in Bel canto, she equates the need to learn Western languages like English with the need to learn other Indigenous languages spoken in Guatemala. When participating in events at film

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festivals, she vindicates Indigenous traditions by wearing elegant regional hand-made dresses, which are carefully chosen each time to represent a different region. Hence, exoticism can be unlinked from cultural voyeurism or tokenism, and exceed the audience’s desire to ‘go[ing] native’. It can be a strategy to pursue social or ethical–political agendas, as Berghahn claims. However, my view on exoticism diverges slightly from Berghahn’s and other scholars’ for two main reasons. First, because I would maintain that exoticism holds an ethnocentric power which should be uncovered even when the exotic is instrumental to praiseworthy aims. Therefore, we should still unearth the ways in which films reproduce as well as resist the exoticizing gaze. Second, and more importantly, for a rehabilitation of exoticism to be possible, the films’ ‘ethic-political agendas’ should be clearly identifiable. In the case of Bustamante and La casa de producción (unlike that of Guerra), they can be tracked clearly through the film’s realist mode of production, the actors and filmmaker’s interventions in the social sphere as well as the work of La casa de producción’s non-profit organization Fundación Ixcanul.

La Llorona In its subsequent projects, La casa de producción continued the kind of work initiated with Ixcanul , using cinema to expose Guatemalan society’s shortcomings in matters of discrimination, human rights and citizenship rights. They made Temblores [Tremors], on homophobia among the Guatemalan middle classes, and La Llorona [The weeping woman], on the 1980s Mayan genocide, both distributed in 2019. The filmmaker declared that the three films constitute a trilogy on the main problems of his country, namely, racial, homosexual and political discrimination, all symbolically expressed through the pejorative terms indio [‘indian’], hueco [‘gay’] and comunista [‘communist’].46 La Llorona was co-written with Lisandro Sánchez, head of distribution at La casa de producción, coproduced with George Renand’s Les films du Vulcan and distributed by Vicente Canales’s Film Factory (the distributor of Damián Szifron’s 2014 Relatos salvajes and Pablo Trapero’s 2015 El Clan as well as of the same Ixcanul ) through a deal secured at the 2018 San Sebastian Europe-Latin America Co-production Forum, where Bustamante won the EFADsCACI Co-production Grant. Most of the cast and crew from the previous films took part in the project: Ixcanul ’s lead actress María Mercedes

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Coroy plays the titular role, appearing alongside María Telón (Ixcanul ), and Margarita Kenéfic and Sabrina De La Hoz (both in Temblores ). Pascual Reyes (music), Beatriz Lantán (costume), Aiko Soto (make-up) and Eduardo Cáceres (sound) and Bustamante’s mother Marina Peralta (co-producer) had worked in the previous productions. The film was very well received by international critics and festivals, winning important prizes at the Venice, Havana and Bergen film festivals. It also competed at the Goya and the Golden Globes and, like Ixcanul , was selected as Guatemala’s official submission for the Academy Awards. The Golden Globes nomination in particular boosted the film’s international visibility and coverage through reviews and interviews. The line of enquiry I pursue in my analysis of the film differs from my previous appraisal of Ixcanul . In relation to La Llorona, I suggest that Bustamante employs the tropes of haunting and spectrality to engage with the Indigenous genocide of the early 1980s as ‘unfinished business’ that requires action to be taken in the present. I also posit that the film employs a number of aesthetic formal and narrative strategies (including genre, intertextuality and soundtrack) to appeal to Guatemalan youth and to create a ‘witness’ spectator that interrogates the memory politics of the Guatemalan state.47 In contrast to Bustamante’s debut film, the mise-en-scène of La Llorona focuses on a ladino48 family from the social and political elite. The earthy landscapes surrounding the Pacaya volcano are now replaced by claustrophobic domestic interiors, which occupy most of the shots. Inspired by the real controversial and labyrinthine trial of former Guatemalan Dictator José Efrain Ríos Montt within the context of the country’s internal conflict (1960–1996), the film’s plot centres on the family of retired General Enrique Monteverde (played by Julio Díaz) in the days after his trial for human rights violations. In the early 2010s, once retired from politics, and no longer immune to prosecution, Ríos Montt had to stand trial for the abuses against the Maya populations committed during his 17-month presidency in 1982–1983. His infamous policy of Quitar el agua al pez [to leave the fish without water] and Fusiles y Frijoles [weapons and beans] resulted in the perpetration of inhuman atrocities against the Maya Indigenous communities. According to the report of the Guatemalan Truth Commission Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico published in 1999, 200,000 people were killed, 45,000 disappeared and between 500,000 and more than a million displaced or forced to exile; the report established that an ethnic genocide was committed

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against the Maya population, especially the inhabitants of the Ixil triangle of North Western Guatemala. In 2013 Ríos Montt was convicted of genocide and sentenced to fifty years of prison, but the sentence was subsequently annulled by Guatemala’s Constitutional Court on procedural grounds. Although a retrial would take place in 2015, Ríos Montt died in 2018 before a verdict was reached. Echoing these real events, the fictional Monteverde stands trial, is declared guilty of genocide, his sentence is then annulled, and he returns home with his family. The long take of the trial sequence is striking: an Ixil woman (witness n. 82), positioned at the centre of the frame in close-up and facing the camera, tells her story of abuses at the hands of the Army in her native language, which is foregrounded by the lack of subtitles. As the court interpreter translates her words into Spanish, the camera pulls back slowly and the frame widens showing the large public seated in the courtroom: Mayan people, female victims, activists, as well as Monteverde’s relatives are among the public. Rigoberta Menchu also appears in this scene, seated in the same place where she was in the real trial. In a symbolic gesture, the female witness briefly lifts her t’zute veil when she asks the court to do justice. This scene was inspired by the trial of the Sepur Zarco case, where a number of women victims testified while wearing a t’zute veil (the one used in the film is transparent for cinematic purposes), which they only lifted at the end of their testimony and declared, ‘If we are not ashamed of telling you what we lived through, we hope you are not ashamed of doing justice’.49 The scene’s blending of fact and fiction recasts the legal witness statement as a collective testimonio and as such addresses the spectator directly, placing her/him under an ‘an obligation to respond’, as John Beverley writes in relation to testimonial literature.50 This ethical imperative informs the memory work of this film, which offers no cathartic release to the spectator but rather interpellates her/him as a ‘witness’, as I shall argue, while intervening in the public sphere with a gesture of ethical and political dissent (Fig. 3.3). Despite this initial sequence, the film does not purse the narrative path of re-enactment and realism, but appealing to the central tropes of haunting and spectrality, offers a diegesis of a series of fictional events which followed the trial. Once back at home, Monteverde’s family become trapped inside when the house is besieged by a crowd of angry protestors demanding justice. The domestic interior itself is then transformed into a haunted space as Monteverde is woken at night by the sound of a weeping female voice. While his relatives dismiss this as a

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Fig. 3.3 Alma (above), and an Ixil woman giving her statement at the trial (below) in two stills from La Llorona

hallucination, the Indigenous domestic servants immediately identify it as the crying of ‘la llorona’ of the homonymous Mesoamerican folk tale. According to the legend, la llorona was the ghost of a murderous mother who, after being abandoned by her lover, killed their children in an act of revenge or grief, and was then condemned to wander eternally in the afterlife. Knowing that the cry anticipates the ghost’s presence, most of

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the Indigenous servants resign except for Valeriana (Telón), the Kaqchikel house maid who is considered part of the family. Valeriana hires a new Kaqchikel maid whom she believes to be from the community in her own village. Alma (played by Coroy) is an enigmatic character; she barely speaks and embarks on mysterious nocturnal walks. With her entrance, the house becomes the scenario for a series of uncanny events: frogs appear in the pool; water leaks from unopened taps; weeping voices are heard coming closer; joyful children’s games turn into threatening events. The audience quickly understand that Alma is the embodiment of la llorona who has come to seek justice for her children and the many other victims of Monteverde’s actions. Through the character of Alma/la llorona, the film interprets Guatemalan recent history as a history of ghosts. Ghosts can be understood as ‘the traces of those who were not allowed to leave a trace; […] [as] the victims of history […] whose stories […] are excluded from the dominant narratives of the victors’,51 as Jo Labanyi claims. Along similar lines, in her seminal study of haunting from a sociological perspective, Avery F. Gordon posits that a ghost usually represents ‘a loss, sometimes of life, sometimes of a path not taken’ as well as the embodiment of those ‘figures from the past who have been rendered invisible’.52 Unsurprisingly, ghost figures have populated narratives of war and memory in Latin America and other post-conflict cultures. Alma is the embodiment of the country’s collective ghosts-victims, but she can more profitably be conceived of as a ‘specter’, in Jacques Derrida’s ‘hauntological’ terms. Like ghosts, spectres ‘produce disjointed time’, invoking a ‘notion of a present that is out of joint, divided from itself by a rift that makes room for the conflictive overlap of the present, the future, and the past’.53 Yet unlike ghosts, spectres ‘evoke an etymological link to visibility and vision […] illuminating phenomena other than the putative return of the dead’, as Maria del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren note.54 The filmmaker takes advantage of the spectres’ ‘liminal position, between visibility and invisibility, life and death, materiality and immateriality, and their association with powerful affects like fear and obsession’55 to engage with the historical invisibilization of Maya victims. Indeed, Alma can be interpreted as ‘a trace that evidences the ruptures in [an] hegemonic discourse’ of forgetting.56 In the particular case of Guatemala, spectrality is an apt metaphor given the peculiar culture of impunity and oblivion surrounding the Indigenous genocide as well as the attempted ‘invisibilization’ of the report of

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the Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico which have dominated the post-conflict years. Post-war Guatemala’s ‘state actors have resisted the implementation of conciliatory acts of post-war commemoration for the victims of state terror during the 36 years of civil war under both military and nominally civil government’,57 an erasure epitomized by the political gestures of several Guatemalan Presidents. Álvaro Arzú (1996–2000) did not accept the report’s truth value58 and refused to physically receive a copy of the report at the official ceremony. During the years of Ríos Montt’s trial, Otto Pérez Molina (2012–2015), himself a retired General, declared that there had not been genocide. Jimmy Morales (2016– 2020) undermined the digitization work of the Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive, which had been essential for investigations into human rights violations; moreover, he did not extend the mandate of the United Nations-backed International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) which ended in 2018; similarly, under Morales’ government the Congress tried to amend the Law of National Reconciliation by introducing amnesty for those involved in human rights abuses during the conflict. The proposed legislative reform was blocked by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the Guatemalan Constitutional Court, although it has not yet been shelved. During his electoral campaign, sitting President Alejandro Giammattei declared that he had lived through the war (while working in the Health Department) but what he had seen was a stupid war, not a genocide. Bearing in mind the failures of the Guatemalan state in matters of transitional justice, the country’s artists have made interventions in the public sphere ‘as a way to create an antagonistic “forum for public dissent”’.59 A celebrated example of such interventions are the visual artworks of renowned photographer Daniel Hernández Salazar, who, incidentally, has also collaborated with Bustamante by creating the promotional photograph for La Llorona.60 According to David Rojinsky, Hernández Salazar’s street interventions in Guatemala in the late 1990s and abroad in the 2000s appealed to the philosophical notions of an urban ‘“ethics of interruption” and an “anachronistic”, “out of joint” present which, ultimately, reflected his striving to give visibility to Guatemala’s recent past on a global stage’.61 Clearly, today, Bustamante’s La casa de producción can be viewed as striving to make an analogous intervention, but from within the realm of mainstream fictional cinema. La Llorona’s miseen-scène harbours the ghost, allowing her to disrupt the status quo and creating for ghosts a ‘hospitable memory out of a concern for justice’.62

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Through Alma/la llorona, Indigenous ghosts abandon their invisibility and become recognizable for haunting recognition is ‘a special way of knowing what has happened or is happening’.63 However, the film claims more than recognition: by intervening in the creation of a ‘forum for public dissent’ and presenting the genocide as ‘unfinished’ business it critiques the failures of Guatemalan state and justice system. The film is equally a denunciation of the structural patriarchy and phallocentrism of Guatemalan conservative society. This explains why although the character of Monteverde is central to the plot, he is actually quite marginal in the mise-en-scène, which instead foregrounds the women surrounding him as well as their reactions to the events. Monteverde’s daughter Natalia questions the image she has always had of the family and the country’s history; her mother Carmen is haunted in her nightmares by the crimes perpetrated by her husband and will end up exposing his immoral lascivious behaviour and eventually killing his husband, while still holding firmly to her class privileges; his granddaughter Sara (Ayla-Elea Hurtado), Natalia’s child, establishes an immediate alliance with the Indigenous Alma. Foregrounding women is not a new choice for Bustamante, as I have shown in the first part of this chapter, but in this film, the focus is also on the three generations: that of the complicit upper-class adults who, as Bustamante has claimed, ‘have lost empathy’; that of the people who were children and have not engaged with the country’s past; and that of the younger generations who, the filmmaker claims, should ‘open those doors and […] do what we could not do’.64 It becomes clear that this film is about ghosts and spectres as much as memory. In La Llorona, the Indigenous ghost becomes ‘a crucible for […] historical memory’65 and the film presents itself as part of the archive that domiciliates the memories of the conflict. The allegorical representation of Guatemalan generations discloses the film’s political aim. Indeed, the message of La Llorona seems quite straightforward: the film questions the politics of accountability and the official politics of memory in relation to the internal war and the ethnic genocide; exposes Guatemalan racialized social structure; and emphasizes the social responsibility that should shape Guatemalan citizenship with a clear message for younger generations. The ways it crafts this message are of particular interest since the film creates a ‘witness’ spectator66 via a number of strategies at narrative and aesthetic level. The first strategy is what Labanyi calls, in reference to the memorialization of the Spanish civil war in Spanish cultural production, an aesthetics of

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haunting, which, unlike realist-documentary aesthetics, does not offer a ‘sense of relief on returning to a present free from such barbarism’.67 Similarly, by presenting the haunting past in the present through the ghost/spectre figure, La Llorona forces the spectator to ‘confront issues of transgenerational transmission and to recognize that the war’s unquiet legacy continues to matter’.68 The aesthetics of haunting does not mimic the trauma and instead proposes a productive relationship with the past: one of an acknowledgement of the past as an unfinished business and a desire for change and action to be taken in the present. As Gordon states, ‘haunting, unlike trauma, is distinctive for producing a somethingto-be-done’.69 Through its postmemorial connection to the past via the ‘imaginative investment’70 of the haunting spectrality, the film presents trauma as an issue of both lived experience and narrative, that is, ‘of telling and listening’71 as well as an ‘unfinished business’ that requires something-to-be-done in the present. The second strategy is the engagement with the horror genre. Unlike other films that have travelled the film festival circuit, La Llorona combines art-house aesthetics with horror conventions such as the presence of dangerous and threatening events or characters; the ‘promise that something hideous will occur’72 ; and the ghost figure. The semi-darkness of the interiors and Nicolás Wong’s camera work of long takes and precisely composed shots of frames—windows, door frames, bunkbeds— that conceal or enclose the bodies, contribute to the uncanny atmosphere. While the choice of the horror genre might be seen as a metaphorical allusion to the atrocities of the genocide, it was in fact a strategic choice motivated by the will to reach a wider public, especially among Guatemalan youth. The team conducted market research and found out that the genre most seen in Guatemalan cinema was, precisely, horror. La Llorona was therefore marketed as a horror film; accordingly, in the UK, it has been distributed by the platform Shudder, which specializes in streaming the genre. As Bustamante explains: The genocide in Guatemala is a topic many people don’t want to touch. They run away from [it] and just don’t want to talk about it. Because of that, I was looking for the best way to tell this story and I thought, ‘What I have to do is insert the content of the story in a package they like, so that people want to see it because of the package in which it’s being delivered and they’ll get the themes inside.’ I conducted a market analysis in Guatemala to understand what types of movie audiences [are] consuming

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in the country, and I learned that 90% of them are watching superhero blockbusters and horror movies. Based on that I started researching how to tell this story in the horror genre and I landed on La Llorona.73

Genre conventions are freely adapted by Bustamante as some fervent horror fans have disappointedly noted on Shudder. However loose, they serve the film’s political goal. Unlike in mainstream horror, the spectator of La Llorona is not ‘vicariously traumatised’ by re-experiencing the trauma re-enacted on-screen through identification with the characters; nor is s/he induced to have ‘only’ an emotional reaction of empathy when confronted with the narration of the victims’ trauma; instead s/he is interpellated as a ‘witness’. ‘Witnessing’, as Kaplan explains, ‘involves not just empathy and motivation to help, but understanding the structures of injustice – that an injustice has taken place […]. Once this happens one may feel obligated to take responsibility for specific injustices’.74 Unlike the modernist cinema discussed by Kaplan, the spectator of La Llorona is interpellated both through the film’s typically mainstream affective mode and exhorted to engage the film critically by its haunting spectrality. The third strategy through which the spectator is interpellated as a ‘spectator witness’ is through the sound design. Indeed, Eduardo Cáceres’s soundtrack (which earned him a prize at La Habana film festival) increases sound to hyper-realistic levels, making it unsettling and eerie while emphasizing its corporeality. The film opens with a mise-enscène of elegantly dressed women in a wealthy house, sitting in a circle, whispering and praying. It is the night before the trial; while Monteverde prepare his ex-colleagues ahead of the trial, their wives rely on religion. Monteverde’s wife Carmen leads the collective feminine prayer. At her side, sits her daughter Natalia; besides them, excluded from the circle, her niece Sara. Whispers and sentences in Spanish and native languages are juxtaposed in confusing patterns of speech and unclear utterances. The only recognizable phrase is por nosotros [for us], the leitmotiv repeated by Carmen, symbolically rendering the self-centredness of the hegemonic class and disclosing the film’s ideological grounding. As the volume of the whispering increases, it merges with a weeping sound in a crescendo. The disjointed camerawork foregrounds the ‘visceral sound design’75 by zooming out from the characters as the sound levels are amplified. The whispers turn into a cry—the cry of La Llorona—and the film’s title appears on the screen. To the literal and metaphorical silence that the victims have been subjected in Guatemalan political history, the film

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opposes enhanced and defamiliarizing sounds. Some of them, like the acousmatic sound of the weeping, are also a way to oppose the controlling systems of signification whereby centralizing and authoritative patriarchal systems exert their ‘prohibitory power’.76 The fourth strategy is the reworking of the well-known Mesoamerican legend of ‘la llorona’. In most versions of the legend, the ghostly ‘llorona’ wails at night wandering near rivers and shores or dark roads searching for either her children or potential victims. In Latin American popular culture, the la llorona figure is considered a cultural allegory instructing people how to behave within established patriarchal and catholic social mores; as such, the figure is also a well-known bogey-[wo]man and an ‘avatar of social and cultural conflict’.77 Modern feminist cultural production has read the legend as a reactionary tale that punishes women for seeking pleasure, independence and opposing dominant social mores; accordingly, the figure has been rehabilitated from a feminist (often conflated with a postcolonial) perspective as a symbol of cultural, social and gender resistance. In the short story ‘Woman Hollering Creek’, for example, the chicana writer Sandra Cisneros turns the weeping character into a ‘gritona’, a hollering woman, empowered and liberated, who escapes patriarchy and domestic violence helping other women to do the same.78 Bustamante therefore enters in this tradition of reconfigurations of the multiple meanings of ‘la llorona’. The film makes reference to several aspects of the tale: the haunting element, the crying, motherhood, the killing of the children and the symbolic element of water. However, in the film ‘la llorona’ is both the perpetrator and the victim. The film’s engagement with victimhood is actually interesting. This film presents yet another way of transforming the Truth Commissions’ figure of the victim discussed in the previous chapter and avoiding both the paternalist gaze and the notion of ‘pure’ victim mentioned in relation to Peru. No longer a woman suffering after being abandoned by her lover, the ‘llorona’’s suffering has been caused by abuses carried out by the state forces. The mise-en-scène of the film does not focus on her status as ‘victim’, but endows her instead with agency as a justiciera [justice seeker]. By ‘hosting’ Alma/la llorona’s revenge, the film acts as a fictional reparation against the real lack of recognition and justice faced by the victims. This is yet another way in which the film complicates horror conventions since Alma’s victim (Monteverde), with whom the spectator would usually identify and sympathize, is himself the perpetrator of horrendous crimes, hence the viewer sympathizes with the dangerous ghost. The

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film’s denouement offers narrative pleasure precisely because it displays the death of the villain-turned-victim Monteverde as well as the beginning of a new haunting. Even so, the film’s resolution does not offer cathartic release, but stresses once more the ‘unfinished’ nature of both the fictional and the real story of those responsible for the genocide. As a narrative of haunting, La Llorona approaches trauma through suggestion and not visualization or re-enactment. Nevertheless, there is one sequence in which the viewer actually sees the abuses against women and their children. As soon as Alma enters the domestic space of the Monteverde family, Carmen is haunted by her husband’s crimes in the form of nightmares in which she is a mother whose children have been killed by the Army and as an innocent victim, she sees herself running through the cornfields to escape the clutches of the murderous soldiers. This is another stirring sequence, not in terms of plot development or ‘recognition’ of the crimes, but in relation to the film’s ethics and overall approach to indigeneity. Margarita Kenéfic, a tall, blonde, white woman who inevitably embodies Guatemalan pigmentocracy, speaks in an Indigenous language, presumably Kaqchikel, which is not translated by accompanying subtitles and thus underscores the radical alterity of the language for the non-Kaqchikel speaking public. However, what is most striking is simply the fact that Kenéfic is heard speaking one of Guatemala’s native languages to denounce war and abuses against women. Within the narrative, the nightmare seems to function as a slow epiphany for Carmen, who will end up killing her husband; as such it might be interpreted as a metaphor for the need to ‘see’ and ‘recognize’ the victims and to ‘acknowledge’ the crimes concealed by civil and military administrations. However, what seems most interesting is its ‘indexical’ content; its denotation rather than its connotation: a tall white and blonde Guatemalan woman speaking in an Indigenous language and being subject to an unspeakable crime. Borrowing from Barthes’s photographic terminology, in this particular scene the ‘studium’ and the ‘punctum’ of the image coincide since it is now the ‘studium’ that ‘pricks’ us, ‘bruise’ us, is ‘poignant’ to us.79 If an Indigenous language spoken by a non-Indigenous character usually serves as a contact zone, in this case it serves to produce a ‘shock’ in the (ladino) viewers that constitute the majority of the country’s spectatorship. The scene is especially shocking because of its inversion of the racialized structure of Guatemala social system, as Bustamante explains:

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The racism in Guatemala is very crude and very strong. When Ixcanul first came to theatres, people would say, ‘Why would I see that? I can watch plenty of Indians in the street.’ It’s really crude like that. People would be laughing at the film in the theatre just because they see a Mayan woman on the screen, like ‘Ahh, there is an Indian!’ [...] They feel the language is part of the past and not part of the progress we have made in the country.80

Significantly, what changed the audience’s attitude was the international press. The filmmaker has explained that only after the international endorsement of the film did the domestic public embrace it. The director has also revealed that the film was initially ostracized because of its ‘political’ content and that he was warned not to work on such a difficult subject. For that reason, the shooting locations were purposefully chosen at protected diplomatic sites such as the Guatemalan residency of the French Ambassador. The last strategy whereby the film counters the dominant culture of oblivion and creates a spectator-witness is its score. The only song of the film is heard at the very end and accompanies the credits. It is ‘La Llorona de los cafetales’, written for this film by the acclaimed Guatemalan singer Gaby Moreno, who has collaborated with Bustamante in this refashioning of the popular song ‘La Llorona’. Moreno and Bustamante turn the wellknown narrative of love of ‘La Llorona’ into one of war and justice. The lyrics made famous by Mexican singers such as Rafael and Chavela Vargas (and, more recently, by Angélica Vale in the film Coco [2017]) are now rewritten as a story of collective suffering in a palimpsestic musical piece that conflates the figure of the legend with that of the song, displaying the new ‘llorona’ as a synecdoche of the ‘wounded Guatemalan people’. Accompanied by the traditional Guatemalan marimba, Moreno’s song articulates a semantic of war through the trope of the bloodstained earth: ‘Everyone wept over that land of yours, Llorona/Your blood-soaked land; that was a sobbing of wounded people, Llorona/And were coming from their silenced voices’. What is only hinted at in the film is thus overtly ‘explained’ in the song: we are told about the persecution, the bullets, the crying, the children. In line with what the viewer has just seen, ‘la llorona’ of the song is not a powerless victim either; she has not lost her strength and demands justice: ‘But what remained was your strength / You came across rows of coffee plantations, grieving / Llorona, crying out for justice’. The videoclip of Moreno’s song was directed by Bustamante

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(and initially served as the film’s trailer) and circulated on the internet. It features Coroy as Alma and combines scenes from the film with images that do not appear in it, but which nevertheless complement, perhaps even complete, the story of La Llorona while also illustrating the song’s lyrics. The ‘llorona de los cafetales’ shouts, talks, sings and dances out of sorrow as a means for expressing the feelings Alma’s silence conceals in the film. The making of a videoclip with a famous young singer based in Los Angeles is arguably a further strategy to reach Guatemalan youth. Like the film, the score addresses the spectator through both an affective and intellectual mode. It brings memory back to the traditional channel of oral storytelling while showing a very contemporary awareness of the logic of the globalized capitalist market. La Llorona is an interesting case of a mainstream fiction film that combines the local with the global, the artistic with the commercial and uses marketing and distribution strategies at the service of a political aim. Its haunting spectrality suggests that the Guatemalan past is still an unfinished business, and while it does not delve deeply into the complexities of the conflict itself, it does manage to trigger in the local viewer ‘a recollection of the litany of acts of political violence which had gone unpunished; to trigger, then, albeit with indignant outrage, a primarily critical and cognitive response’ in the local audience, as Rojinsky argues in relation to the work of Hernández Salazar.81 It is in this sense that La llorona interpellates the viewer as a witnessing and ethically committed spectator who needs to interrogate the very structures of injustice which allowed as well as concealed the Maya populations’ historical traumas. La Llorona is an example of ‘duty-memory’ cinema which overcomes some of the limitations of La teta asustada and sees memory as a political, judicial, social, ethical and moral obligation; as an individual as well as collective social process that requires going beyond empathy and affective identification involving critical reflection. Like Ixcanul , the mode of production of La Llorona is informed by an ‘ethics of the real’: the team crew held focus groups with the Indigenous people who had experienced the conflict to ensure the ethical correctness of the trial sequence. Reflecting such commitment, all the extras present in the trial sequence are named in the film’s final credits. Despite its international visibility and its accessibility for the international viewer, La Llorona’s focus on local elements distances the film from those ‘transnational post-conflict memorial art projects’, which, according to Rojinsky, derritorialize local

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conflicts and insert them within a global circuit thus reducing their ‘capacity for […] antagonism’.82 Even so, what cannot be overlooked is the simple fact that, as Xinico Balts has pointed out, these films do not tell the stories as ‘we [the Kaqchikel people] would tell them on our own terms’.83 Yet, at the same time, it does show that, notwithstanding the limitations of films made about and with Indigenous people, rather than by Indigenous people, and albeit within the formal limitations of art-house cinema and commercial filmic codes, Bustamante’s cinematic projects offer possibilities for social advocacy and even dissent.

Notes 1. It is relevant to say that in 2015, Madeinusa was included in programme of NATIVe-A Journey into Indigenous Cinema, a sidebar at the Berlinale. See note 72 of Chapter 1 and also Peirano’s article ‘NATIVe—A Journey into Indigenous Cinema.’ 2. The prize was suspended in 2020 after revelations that Alfred Bauer (the Berlinale’s first director) had deep associations with the Nazi Party. 3. See the final chapter of this book. 4. Amanda Alfaro Córdoba, ‘Can María Speak?: Interpreting Ixcanul/Volcano (2015) from a Decolonial Perspective,’ Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas 15, No. 2 (2018), 189. 5. Dennison, ‘Debunking Neo-Imperialism,’ 186. 6. Scott Foundas, ‘Berlin Film Review: “Ixcanul Volcano”,’ Variety [online] February 7, 2015, available at https://variety.com/ 2015/film/reviews/berlin-film-review-volcano-1201427204/. 7. Alfaro Córdoba, ‘Can María Speak?’ 200. 8. Dante Liano, ‘De Distancia a Ixcanul: la función vicaria del cine en la época contemporánea,’ Istmo. Revista virtual de estudios literarios y culturales centroamericanos 35 (2017), 50. 9. Michelle Warren and Sonja H. Bickford, ‘Market Demands and the Perpetuation of Poverty: City Versus Country in Jayro Bustamante’s Ixcanul,’ El ojo que piensa No. 20 (2020), 11. 10. Carolyn Fornoff, ‘On the Recent Guatemalan Film Ixcanul,’ Mediático [online], August 8, 2016, available at On the recent Guatemalan film IXCANUL—Mediático (sussex.ac.uk). 11. Alfaro Córdoba, ‘Can María Speak?’ 191.

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12. Sandra Xinico Batz, ‘El síndrome de Ixcanul: ¿entre realidad y película? – Part I,’ La Hora [online] September 17, 2016, available at https://lahora.gt/sindrome-ixcanul-realidad-peliculaparte-i/; ‘El síndrome de Ixcanul: ¿entre realidad y película?—Part II,’ La Hora [online] September 24, 2016, available at https:// lahora.gt/sindrome-ixcanul-realidad-pelicula-parte-ii/. 13. Ixq’anil Judith M. Maxwell and Jun Ajpu’ Brett C. Nelson, ‘Film Review: Ixcanul [sic]: A Commentary from Oxlajuj Aj,’ Latin American Research Centre [online] October, 2018, available at https://larc.ucalgary.ca/publications/film-review-ixcanulsic-commentary-oxlajuj-aj. 14. Xinico Batz, ‘El síndrome de Ixcanul.’ 15. Júlia González de Canales Carcereny, ‘Películas en lenguas indígenas producidas en países hispanohablantes: Ixcanul y El abrazo de la serpiente,’ Diálogo 23, No. 1 (Spring 2020), 7–19. 16. Joseph M. Pierce, ‘Roma Is a Beautiful Film of Indigenous Erasure,’ [online] December 29, 2018, available at https://www. josephmpierce.com/post/roma-is-a-beautiful-film-of-indigenouserasure. 17. Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism, 348. 18. Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism, 348. 19. Chris Knight, ‘Ixcanul Is a Moving Portrait of a Clash of Cultures We North Americans May Never Experience Firsthand,’ National Post [online] August 26, 2016, available at https://nationalp ost.com/entertainment/movies/ixcanul-is-a-moving-portrait-ofa-clash-of-cultures-we-north-americans-may-never-experience-fir sthand; Jordan Hoffman, ‘Ixcanul Review—A Fascinating Blend of Modernity and Ritual,’ The Guardian [online] September 12, 2015, available at https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/ sep/12/ixcanul-review-fascinating-blend-of-modernity-and-ritualtoronto-film-festival 20. Debra A. Castillo, ‘Trafficked Babies, Exploded Futures: Jayro Bustamante’s Ixcanul,’ in Indigenous Interfaces, eds. Jennifer Gómez Menjivar and Gloria Elizabeth Chacón, 119–120. 21. Rigoberta Menchú, Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia (México, DF: Siglo XXI Editores, 1982). 22. Castillo, ‘Trafficked Babies,’ 128. 23. Alfaro Córdoba, ‘Can Maria Speak?’ 198. 24. Castillo, ‘Trafficked Babies,’ 128.

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25. Nagib, Realist Cinema, 30. 26. Nagib, Realist Cinema, 23. See also Lúcia Nagib, World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism (New York and London: Continuum, 2011). 27. The film credits the translations from Spanish into Kaqchikel is to María Elisa Orón Cuca and Justo Lorenzo. 28. Alfaro Córdoba, ‘Can María Speak?’ 29. Guatemala—IWGIA—International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs. 30. Bustamante claims that he showed the films in the communities where they shot as a humble gesture of recognition and appreciation of the generosity the communities had shown during the shooting. 31. Castillo, ‘Trafficked Babies,’ 124. 32. Castillo, ‘Trafficked Babies,’ 124. 33. Bustamante explains: ‘I have to make entertainment that has meaningful stories that deal with important topics. In a sense, La Casa de Producción is following that path. Every project we receive has to somewhat deal with the defence of human rights or with shining light on those who have been kept in the dark. We are very committed to that.’ 34. For which he was supported by the Culture and Sport Ministry and the Foreign Affairs Ministry. 35. As the French Victor Segalen wrote long ago. See Charles Forsdick ‘Travelling Concepts: Postcolonial Approaches to Exoticism,’ in Travel in Twentieth-Century French and Francophone Cultures: The Persistence of Diversity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 22. 36. See Isabel Santaolalla’s introduction in her edited volume ‘New’ Exoticisms: Changing Patterns in the Construction of Otherness (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000). 37. Daniela Berghahn, ‘Encounters with Cultural Difference: Cosmopolitanism and Exoticism in Tanna (Martin Butler and Bentley Dean, 2015) and Embrace of the Serpent (Ciro Guerra, 2015),’ Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media 14 (Winter, 2017), 21. See also De Valck, ‘Screening World Cinema at Film Festivals’ for a discussion of the relationship between distributions strategies, World Cinema, authenticity and festivalization.

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38. Fabiola Mancinelli, ‘Shifting Values of “Primitiveness” Among the Zafimaniry of Madagascar: An Anthropological Approach to Tourist Mediators’ Discourses,’ Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change 12, No. 3 (2014), 234. 39. Mancinelli, ‘Shifting Values,’ 230. 40. Bill Nichols, ‘Discovering Form, Inferring Meaning: New Cinemas and the Film Festival Circuit,’ Film Quarterly 47, No. 3 (1994). 41. Nichols, ‘Discovering Form,’ 16–17. 42. Mancinelli, ‘Shifting Values,’ 230. 43. Mancinelli, ‘Shifting Values,’ 233. 44. Elsaesser, European Cinema, 510. 45. Mancinelli, ‘Shifting Values,’ 233. 46. ‘My three films represent what Guatemalans consider the three biggest insults: “Indio!” Calling a Guatemalan “Indio,” despite the country’s overwhelming Indigenous population, is considered a massive insult. […] Temblores (Tremors) epitomizes the slur “Hueco,” which is a local derogatory term for gay. Temblores delves into the homophobia prevalent in conservative Guatemalan society as a well-to-do family seeks conversion therapy for its gay patriarch. La Llorona embodies the third insult, “Communist,” which is a carryover of the 1950s sentiment against communism, which later devolved into accusing those advocating for human rights and for reducing Guatemala’s vast wealth gap as communists […]’. Anna Marie de La Fuente, ‘Guatemala’s Jayro Bustamante Says Making Political Horror Mash-Up “La Llorona” Was “Strategic”,’ Media Play News [online] August 3, 2020, available at https://www.mediaplaynews.com/guatemalas-jayrobustamante-political-horror-mash-up-la-llorona/. 47. For the notions of ‘unfinished business’ and ‘spectator-witness’, I draw on Labanyi (‘Memory and Modernity’) and Kaplan (Trauma Culture), respectively. 48. In Guatemala, the term ladino is used in the official census to refer to one of the two main ethnicities (the other being the Maya). For some, it is synonymous of mestizo, although ladino can also be understood as having a less fixed meaning and might include also those (few) people who would be defined as criollos in other regions. There also seems to be a consensus on that it usually refers to Westernized people. Therefore, ladino can be simply thought of as ‘non-Indigenous ethnicity’ or ‘non-Indigenous population.’

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49. Carlos Aguilar ‘Crying for Justice: Jayro Bustamante on La Llorona,’ available at https://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/ crying-for-justice-jayro-bustamante-on-la-llorona. 50. See John Beverley, Testimonio: On the Politics of Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). 51. As Labanyi states drawing on Derrida. Labanyi ‘Introduction: Engaging with Ghosts; or, Theorizing Culture in Modern Spain,’ in Constructing Identity in Contemporary Spain: Theoretical Debates and Cultural Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 1. 52. Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 63. 53. Alberto Ribas-Casasayas and Amanda L. Peterson, Espectros: Ghostly Hauntings in Contemporary Transhispanic Narratives (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2016), 13. 54. María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, eds., The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 2. 55. Blanco and Peeren, The Spectralities Reader, 2. 56. Ribas-Casasayas and Peterson, Espectros, 2. 57. David Rojinsky, ‘Urban Photographic Memorials (iii): Never Again!’ in forthcoming monograph Visual Memories of Dictatorship (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2022). 58. Rojinsky, ‘Urban Photographic Memorials.’ 59. Rojinsky, ‘Urban Photographic Memorials.’ 60. I thank David Rojinsky for pointing out this to me. 61. Rojinsky, ‘Urban Photographic Memorials.’ 62. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 175. 63. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 63. 64. Aguilar, ‘Crying for Justice.’ 65. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 18. 66. E. Ann Kaplan, Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 2005). 67. Jo Labanyi, ‘Memory and Modernity in Democratic Spain: The Difficulty of Coming to Terms with the Spanish Civil War,’ Poetics Today 28, No. 1 (2007), 103. 68. Labanyi, ‘Memory,’ 103.

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69. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 2. 70. Hirsch, Postmemory, 5. 71. Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Postmodernism as Mourning Work,’ Screen 42, No. 2, 196. 72. Thomas M. Sipos, Horror Film Aesthetics: Creating the Visual Language of Fear (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co, 2010), 5. 73. Carlos Aguilar, ‘Crying for Justice: Jayro Bustamante on La Llorona,’ Roger Ebert [online] August 6, 2020, available at https://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/crying-for-jus tice-jayro-bustamante-on-la-llorona. 74. Kaplan, Trauma Culture, 23. 75. Andrew Simpson, ‘La Llorona Review: The Ghosts of Guatemala’s Disappeared Come Calling,’ available at La Llorona (The Weeping Woman) review: The ghosts of Guatemala’s disappeared come calling|Sight & Sound|BFI. 76. Geoffrey Elia Kantaris, ‘The Politics of Desire: Alienation And Identity in The Work of Marta Traba And Cristina Peri Rossi,’ Forum for Modern Language Studies 25, No. 3 (July 1989), 248–264. 77. Domino Renee Perez, There Was a Woman: La Llorona from Folklore to Popular Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 12. 78. Sandra Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek (New York: Vintage Books, 1992). 79. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982). 80. Nico Pitnay, ‘This Mayan-Language Film Is the Best Thing in Theatres Right Now,’ HuffPost [online] January 9, 2017, available at https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/ixcanul-jayrobustamante_n_57c858dae4b0a22de0948cfb?ri18n=true. 81. Rojinsky, ‘Urban Photographic Memorials.’ 82. Rojinsky, ‘Urban Photographic Memorials.’ 83. Xinico Batz, ‘El síndrome de Ixcanul.’

CHAPTER 4

Human Rights Culture and the (Im)possibilities of Decoloniality: El abrazo de la serpiente (2015)

The dynamic of transnational mobility and national belonging which shaped the ‘social life’ of Ciro Guerra’s El abrazo de la serpiente, a film on Amazonian indigeneity, is not dissimilar from that found in the other films discussed so far. In 2015, El abrazo de la serpiente won the Art Cinema Award at the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs of the 47th Cannes Film Festival as well as several other prizes at other festivals. It was then selected to represent Colombia in the Best Foreign Film category at the 2016 Academy Awards and did reach the final nominations; director Ciro Guerra, producer Cristina Gallego and the late actor Tiapuyama-Antonio Bolívar Salvador flew to the USA to take part in the ceremony in Los Angeles. The Oscar nomination prompted a discourse of national belonging, propelled particularly by state representatives such as the Minister of Culture Mariana Garcés, who referred to the nomination using the pronouns ‘we, us’, and Claudia Triana de Vargas, the director of Proimágenes Colombia, which administrates the Fondo para el Desarrollo Cinematográfico; also supporting the film was Lena Estrada Añokazi, from the OPIAC (the Organization of Indigenous Peoples of Colombian Amazon). Triana de Vargas explained that the Oscars nomination transformed the film from one ‘to be watched by Guerra and his ten friends’ into one that every Colombian should watch ‘otherwise they would […] feel guilty’.1 This feeling of guilt reflects the inclusive idea of Colombianess that the film came to embody: one close to that © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. C. D’Argenio, Indigenous Plots in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93914-4_4

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associated with culture and biodiversity being promoted by the government’s national branding campaigns. Hence, this dynamic of mobility and belonging mirrors the paradoxical coexistence of regimes of exclusion and inclusion of current neoliberal politics of multiculturalism with regard to racialized populations such as the Indigenous peoples. However, as Juana Suarez explains, the film also became a cultural phenomenon that generated conversation on Colombian cinema as well as on ‘cultural loss, abandonment of ancestral cultures, landscape’.2 Thus, its social life shares commonalities with the films discussed so far; furthermore, due to its national and international visibility, El abrazo de la serpiente embodies even more clearly the duality at the core of the cinematic trend I am mapping in this book: namely, that between a visibility that foregrounds ‘silenced voices’ and signals off-screen realities marked by marginalization, and a conversation which remains predominantly on those silenced voices instead of with them. El abrazo de la serpiente is yet another multilayered film and complex audiovisual event that signals fertile avenues for enquiry and enacts important cultural work while also showing the limitations of cinematic representation. In what follows, I propose another holistic reading to suggest that El abrazo de la serpiente is part of a larger project about humanity which attests to both the film’s potential for as well as the impossibility of decoloniality. In order to elucidate this, I shall begin with an analysis of Guerra’s first feature-length film La sombra del caminante [The wandering shadow].

La sombra del caminante La sombra del caminante [The wandering shadow] was the first featurelength film of the duo Ciro Guerra (director) and Cristina Gallego (producer). The film was released in 2004, the year after they graduated from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia.3 A low-budget production entirely in black and white and shot with very precarious means, La sombra del caminante is set in contemporary Bogotá and, in neorealist fashion, tells the story of the encounter and friendship between two principal characters: Mansalva (Ignacio Prieto), a silletero [‘chair-man’] who carries people across the city on a chair tied to his back, and Mañe (César Badillo), a disabled and unemployed desplazado de la guerra [someone displaced by the war] who tries to make a living out of selling little origami models. The film’s narrative and mise-en-scène revolve around the notion of the human and the non-human; either because of ‘strange’

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appearances (Mansalva wears goggles as a mask and has a chair on his back) or bodily difference (Mañe has a wooden leg), both men are perceived as ‘inhuman’ in the public domain. To a passerby, in the case of Mansalva, and to a group of abusive youngsters, in the case of Mañe, the men deviate from a ‘performance of normality’4 ; they are ‘monsters’, paradoxical embodiments of humanity and inhumanity. As Jeffrey Cohen puts it, monsters are ‘embodiments of certain cultural moments’, ‘displacements’ that refer to something else.5 In La sombra del caminante, monsters are traces of a war: specifically, the internal conflict between the State, the leftist guerrilla and the right-wing paramilitary groups which shaped Colombian history from the 1960s onwards. Mañe is a survivor of a massacre carried out in his village when he was a child; his disabilities are the result of this violence. Mansalva is a former member of a paramilitary group and, we find out towards the end of the film, the very executioner of Mañe’s family, and author of his friend’s visible wounds. In the early 2010s, La sombra del caminante proposed a novel cinematic treatment of the internal armed conflict and Colombian violencia, which prompted critics to indicate in Guerra one of the initiators of a New Colombian Cinema (something that Guerra seemed to disagree with). What is beyond doubt is that by exploring issues of collective memory and the impact of the conflict on civilian life, La sombra del caminante departed from the a(n)esthetization of violence dominant in commercial television6 ; it also focused on individuals and the unspoken voices of the victims7 using a subtle cinematic language of implicit and latent truths.8 Aesthetically, the film is quite experimental combining neorealism with an acknowledgement of the medium’s artificiality through distortions of temporality, extensive use of close-up and multiple points of view. What is especially relevant about this film in the context of this book is that Guerra and Gallego reject mainstream cinema conventions and expose the inhumanity of the conflict through a focus on the ‘humanity’ that arises in the encounters between the different characters; humanity is understood here in terms of moral concepts such as dignity and respect, those very concepts that, according to Giorgio Agamben, ended with the horrors of the genocides of the twentieth century.9 Furthermore, also relevant is that they frame the theme of the legacy of war within a story about ‘universal’ values and concepts such as friendship, loss and mourning. The dialectics between, on the one hand, inhumanity/humanity and, on the other hand, local conflict/universal values, as well as the notion of human encounter, will all re-emerge in Guerra and Gallego’s subsequent productions.

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In La sombra del caminante, the issue is the dehumanization of the individual caused by an experience of war which drives combatants towards a liminal state of ‘denial of humanity to others’. The war situation depicted in this film can thus be understood as analogous to a political ‘state of exception’ as examined by Agamben, that is, ‘a threshold between normalcy and chaos, where law withdraws to create a new sphere of the political, a sphere where human life loses its “dignity” and falls into a zone of non-distinction’.10 Trained in the dehumanizing techniques of the Army, Mansalva has become an inhuman being; as a soldier, he had to ‘give up the value of [his] own life and acknowledge it, in Agamben terms, only as “bare life”, and hence becoming [one of the] “bodies to be killed”’.11 Once back in civilian life, he embodies even more clearly Agamben’s notion of homo sacer, the ‘one-time citizen reduced to […] bare life’,12 isolated, accursed, ‘set apart’. He is however, haunted by the very human feelings of guilt. Meanwhile, still technically a ‘citizen’, Mañe is nevertheless represented as an extreme version of marginalization; abandoned by state institutions, he faces daily abuse, loneliness and alienation, hence, representing again the homo sacer, this time not as an exception of modern states, but as modernity’s emblematic subject.13 Both characters are represented for the most part of the film as victims through an aesthetics of ‘weakness’.14 In other words, there is a certain privileging of the inner and private realms, of normally silenced voices, of the ugly, the marginal, the intimate, and hence, a generalized rejection of masculine patriarchal approaches to violence. It is in the encounter between these forgotten marginalities that humanity emerges as a force opposing the dehumanization, not only of the war but also of modern neoliberal cities. Humanity maintains its capacity for resistance even at the film’s climax when it is revealed that Mansalva gave the order to kill Mañe’s family. When the story of friendship turns into one of memory and of (an impossible) forgiving between a survivor and his executioner, the film rejects narrative closure. Instead, the very human feelings of guilt, (un)forgiveness and loss are exposed in such a way that according to María Ospina, there is a refusal ‘to equate confession with forgetfulness, or with forgiveness’,15 although Mañe’s final act of burying the video after Mansalva’s death might suggest that some sort of collective healing is needed. Humanity in this film aims to trigger empathy towards the victims of an unjust war and towards those who have been forced into dehumanization; although in light of Agamben’s reflection on bare life, the gesture of recovering the soldier’s lost humanity also acquires a

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political dimension. Furthermore, drawing on what was discussed in the previous chapter, we could argue that empathy coexists here with cognitive enquiry, given that such enquiry is fomented by the film’s aesthetics of (formal) rupture. The experimental approach to the inhibition of narrative closure, and indeed to character identification serves to invite the audience to both immerse themselves in the story through emotional investment, while simultaneously withdrawing from it in favour of a more distanced politics of perception. Consequently, they might then critically engage the inhuman ‘zones of indistinction’ wherein modern-day homo sacer resides and ponder the question of how to return humanity to modern subjectivity.16

Humanity in El abrazo de la serpiente After La sombra del caminante, the duo embarked on a project that focused on Colombian regional cultures and involved working with the local Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities of the north-east regions of the country, near Guerra’s hometown Río de Oro. Los viajes del viento, released in 2009, tells the story of a journey through and an encounter with territories ranging from Majagual, in the Sucre department, to Taroa, in La Guajira. Set in 1968, the year of the first Festival of the Vallenato Legend, the famous juglar [minstrel] Ignacio sets off for his final journey in order to give back his accordion to his teacher and mentor, who lives in the Alta Guajira; on his journey he encounters the young Fermín, an aspiring juglar who insists on accompanying him. Their journey is one of encounters with local peoples, stories, music and customs. While both films differ aesthetically and thematically, there are significant similarities between them and all of Guerra and Gallego’s films, including their fourth film Pájaros de Verano [Birds of Passage] (2018), which followed El abrazo de la serpiente and was co-directed by Gallego; such similarities shed light on some of the concerns that are played out in El abrazo de la serpiente. Taken as a whole, their films constitute an exploration of Colombian cultural and geographical heterogeneity and of key moments of the country’s history: the city and the internal conflict; local regional and native cultures and the development of vallenato music; the Amazon’s population and its history of abuse; the (unheard) account of Colombian drug trafficking. The films also reveal a preoccupation with friendships and human encounters across cultures and

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generations and with embodied experiences; a utopian notion of intercultural dialogue; an ideology of hope and humanity in opposition to the reduction of individuals to bare life within Colombia’s history of genocides and internal conflict. In aesthetic terms, considering the four films holistically allows us to identify a shift from an experimental language in La sombra del caminante to the employment of genre registers (the road movie, the adventure, the Western), the aesthetization of landscapes and the adhesion to mainstream conventions in terms of narrative, spectatorial identification and resolution. Interestingly, this shift was paralleled by their growing recognition by and positive reception on the international film festival circuit. According to María Luna and Philippe Meers, Guerra’s films are examples of ‘cosmopolitan cinematic margins’, that is, films about ‘Colombian remote places and, by extension, the communities that inhabit them’ that ‘gain visibility within international arenas of film appreciation and consumption’.17 The project of El abrazo de la serpiente started with Guerra’s study of the journals of Theodor Koch-Grunberg and Richard Evans Shultes, a German ethnographer and an American ethnobotanist who travelled in the region in the early and mid-twentieth century and disseminated knowledge about the Colombian Amazon.18 Other initial sources were the texts of European explorers Karl Friedrich Philipp von Martius, Alexander von Humboldt and Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff. While the initial draft of the script mirrored the scientists’ journals closely, following the chronological development of their ethnographic journeys, the initial focus on the scientists shifted towards a focus on Indigenous culture. The filmmaker decided on this shift after making a journey, with the support of his friend, the anthropologist Ignacio Prieto,19 to the Amazonian departments of Caquetá, Vaupés, Guainía, Amazonas, which would become the film locations, and met with the local communities there. Subsequently, having attempted to reframe the story from ‘an Indigenous perspective’, Guerra decided to combine Indigenous and Western cosmogonies, myths and storytelling, and finalized the script with the help of Jacques Toulemonde Vidal, credited as co-writer. A decisive input came from Cristina Gallego, who suggested centring the narrative on the character of Karamakate and abandoning a linear chronological development in favour of flashbacks and parallel stories in order to get closer to native conceptions of time. The final script therefore replaced the journals as the main narrative axis with a central focus on the Indigenous character. The making of the film took several years due, on the one hand, to the length of

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time needed to complete the research and scriptwriting processes and, on the other, to the difficulties in obtaining funding. After an initial seed capital from the Colombian Fondo para el Desarrollo Cinematográfico, the producer struggled to get funding until Dago García and Caracol Television joined the project. Other funding sources were well-known international bodies such as Ibermedia, the Hubert Bals Fund and the Argentine INCAA. Centring on the fictional native shaman Karamakate, El abrazo de la serpiente tells the story of his encounters with Theo Von Martius (Jan Bijvoet) and Richard Evans Schultes (Brionne Davis) during the scientists’ separate journeys across the tropical jungle and along its river in search of the sacred curative plant yakruna. The parallel narrative structure cuts back and forth between the two journeys and the two different historical periods. Karamakate, who possesses knowledge about the yakruna and agrees to guide both scientists in their search, is the last of his people. He is depicted as a young shaman/warrior in the first story (when he is played by Nilbio Torres) and as an older subject dealing with the loss of his knowledge and identity in the second (in which he is played by Tiapuyama-Antonio Bolívar Salvador). As the film’s title suggests, the plot is imbued with versions of Amazonian myths (not all from the Colombian Amazon), such as the primordial anaconda of the creation of the Amazon and that of the chullachaki creature, to which I will return. The film opens with a sensorial immersion in the Amazon. The sounds of the selva on a black screen anticipate the following images: a shot of the river frames the trees reflected in the water; then the camera, placed at river level, moves towards the shore to reveal Karamakate in a squatting position, re-enacting the pose of another Indigenous subject from an early twentieth-century photograph that appears on the screen during the end credits. Partially naked and wearing significant accessories, he has a fierce expression and is looking attentively at the river when he notices a nearly imperceptible (to the audience) modification of sound. The camera cuts to Karamakate framed from behind, surrounded by vegetation; it then zooms in towards him until an over-the-shoulder shot shows us what he is seeing: a canoe arriving at the shore. In the canoe are the sick von Martius and his Indigenous guide Manduca (Yauenkü Miguee-Miguel Dionisio Ramos); they are looking for Karamakate in the hope of his being able to save the life of Theo who, we soon find out, can only be cured by the yakruna, a sacred healing plant, about which only Karamakate and his people have knowledge. From the start, the visual language employed

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challenges the negative politics of recognition that inform Eurocentric verbal and visual discourses: editing and image composition give Karamakate centrality; his accessories, face painting and bodily gestures convey warrior-like qualities that do not fit with conventional Western imagery of Indigenous shamanism; the native subject is framed alone and not in relation to a white man; and, finally, an Indigenous ‘gaze’, which is constructed through camera work and mise-en-scène, leads the spectator to assume, for a few seconds, Karamakate’s point of view. The visual language combines art-house features with a mainstream depiction of the ‘hero’; unlike mainstream cinema, however, the hero is not a white man but is now an Indigenous individual (Fig. 4.1). The first sequence highlights the humanity of the characters. Here humanity is a shared quality that does important cultural work since it undermines the Eurocentric binary we/others and the hierarchical values thereof. The film’s characterization returns the ‘intelligence and humanity’ to the non-European that they were deprived of by the racist ideology of philosophical modernity as well as, again adapting Agamben’s

Fig. 4.1 The young Karamakate in a still from El abrazo de la serpiente (Courtesy of Peccadillo Pictures)

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reflection, the ‘indignity’ to which they have been subjected throughout history. Here, humanity means both the opposite of dehumanization and the ontological, moral and ethical complexity of human subjectivity which counters the reductionist operations of exoticization and stereotyping. Karamakate and Theo are depicted as nuanced and complex characters with ‘contradictions, obscure sides, grey zones’.20 The humanity of Karamakate is immediately apparent when he is informed by Theo that members of his people, whom he thought had all been killed by white men, are still alive. He initially shows anger, sorrow, hesitance, until he eventually and reluctantly agrees to take the scientists to find the sacred plant. Theo is also represented in terms of his ‘human’ qualities, even though his humanity is defined by morality, vulnerability and, most significantly, by the fact that he is not depicted carrying out scientific endeavours. Theo is not depicted identifying, naming or cataloguing nature or people in line with scientific work; instead, like Evan in the second narrative, he is portrayed in a condition of lack and epistemic vulnerability. Theo lacks health and the necessary knowledge that might cure him. Similarly, Evan lacks knowledge about the yakruna. Both scientists need the help and knowledge of the Indigenous Karamakate. The positioning of lack here is eloquent, since the discursive category of lack, as we have seen in a previous chapter, has been a key trope of colonialist and Eurocentric discourses in their depiction of the non-West. Paraphrasing Teresa de Lauretis on the subversion of gender roles in cultural production, the film positions the scientists outside (of, namely, power) by displacing them within it.21 What is displaced here is the Western scientists’ agency. What is foregrounded is their humanity. In the second narrative strand, this human contact is even more predominant as demonstrated by the film’s ending. When the old Karamakate and Evan reach the Cerros de Mavecure they find that only one yakruna has survived and Karamakate appears recovering his memory and knowledge. While in his youth he had decided to destroy the yakruna to avoid further exploitation of his land by the whites, now his decision is to transfer his knowledge to Evan. The film’s gesture of displacing lack and locating humanity in the Indigenous character is a first indication of its ideological grounding, that is, its challenge to Eurocentrism using what Shohat and Stam call a multicultural and polycentric cinematic approach.22 The representation of the voice is another key mechanism in such an endeavour. In fact, multiculturalism is also multilingualism in this film spoken in several Indigenous

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languages and several Western languages: the dominance of the colonial language (Spanish) is undermined by the use of Portuguese, English, German and Latin, but, especially, by the primary use of Indigenous languages such as cubeo, wuitoto, ticuna and guanano over Western ones. Such polycentric multilingualism contests the couple authority/language that has informed imperialist ventures, but it also serves the characterization of the Indigenous characters. Manduca, for example, in addition to speaking Spanish and German and his own Indigenous idiom, shows some familiarity with other native languages when he addresses Karamakate for the first time. While such multilingualism might have been a choice that responds to a search for verisimilitude, what is relevant is that it contributes to dismantling the colonial positioning of knowledge and overturns its representation of lack. It is Theo who needs to speak Karamakate’s language, not the other way around. And it is Karamakate who establishes what language they must speak. Theo’s knowledge of the native language does not show superiority, nor is it associated with the exercise of dominance as is the case in colonial enterprises. Language in the plot might be understood as a ‘contact zone’, adapting Mary Louise Pratt’s notion, rather than an instrument of power (as in colonialism): in other words, a site for ‘cultural encounters, wherein power is negotiated and struggle occurs’.23 Language(s) allow cultural encounters of different kinds, all involved with power relations and historical struggles. Within the film’s plot, language allows the encounter between the travellers and the natives and the symbolic sharing of experience and knowledge. But the notion of ‘contact zone’ applies also, and perhaps more significantly, to the linguistic and cultural interactions that the making of the film entailed. The making of El abrazo de la serpiente involved not only a textual study of written sources on Amazonian cultures but also in situ research or fieldwork in the Amazonian communities. The latter proved to be crucial for the filmmaker’s understanding of Indigenous cultures and for establishing a dialogue with the communities, which were asked for permission to shoot in their territories. What is interesting about this dialogue is not only the information gathered, which fed into the film script (in terms of cosmogony and mythology), but also the very encounter between people from different cultures and languages that lies at the heart of the film. Here, the ‘racial politics of casting’ come into play.24 Unlike other films on the tropics and on indigeneity, the Indigenous characters here are played by non-professional actors from the Colombian Amazon. The languages spoken are among the native

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languages of the Amazonian region. Since they are not written languages, the production crew used a translation technique that would not involve writing. As the director has explained in interviews, they created a sort of ‘Indigenous dictionary’ to be learned by the non-Indigenous actors (Jan Bijvoet and Brionne Davies). Tiapuyama-Antonio Bolívar played a crucial role in the translation and rewriting of the screenplay because he was familiar with different Indigenous languages. He was the translator of the crew and taught the sections in native languages to the foreign actors.25 Like the other films discussed in this book, the production stage was dependent on native people’s agency and entailed important ‘real’ negotiations: the members of the Indigenous communities contacted by the crew granted permission to do the shooting and shared their history and culture which were reformulated and adapted in the script; the Indigenous actors did not follow a written script but rather translated ideas communicated by the filmmakers26 ; during the shooting, native people collaborated by manufacturing elements of the mise-en-scène such as clothing accessories. Of course, we should acknowledge the limits of such agency: it is restricted to the Indigenous advisors, actors and people involved in the film’s production; it is predicated upon the overall decisions of the filmmaker and films’ crew; the native language were retranslated into Spanish/English and arguably reinterpreted at the service of narrative linearity and coherence for the Western audience. Even so, I want to emphasize the co-presence of Indigenous actors and people and the non-Indigenous film crew in collaborative activities which the director, producer and the three native actors describe in terms of a relationship of ethical respect and friendship; of, perhaps, kind humanity.

From Humanity to Human Rights Culture The encounters between the scientists and the shamans are contextualized in two specific historical moments, chosen because of their relevance in the history of violence against and dehumanization of native Amazonians at the hands of white men. El abrazo de la serpiente refers to two specific events of Western exploitation: missionary-enforced evangelism and the early twentieth-century atrocities of the rubber trade. On their way to the Cohiuano people, Theo, Karamakate and Manduca stop at the Capuchin Mission of Anthony of Padua in the Vaupés region. In the film,

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the mission is situated in the former rubber station of La Chorrera. This sequence relates to the religious and political role played by the missions in the colonization of the Amazonian territories, a process that was undergoing a revival at the turn of the nineteenth century. As Amada Carolina Pérez explains, from the mid-1800s, missionization was promoted by the expansionist aims of both the Vatican and the then recently established Colombian state. With the rise of global capitalism and need for primary goods, new missions received state funding, in line with the 1887 Concordat.27 The aim of the missions was to ‘civilise the savages and convert them into sons of God and of the homeland’ while taking care of the nation’s borders.28 In El abrazo de la serpiente, the character of the friar embodies the missionary repertoire of themes and discourses as they have reached us through official reports. As Pérez points out, the standard missionary view of indigeneity was shaped, not surprisingly, by the dichotomy between civilized society and Indigenous savagery. Among the motives that justified missionary labour was ‘bringing [Indigenous subjects] out of the shadows, of barbarism and primitive life’.29 They would be reincorporated into civilian life and even back into their own territories once educated. However, they would no longer own their lands, but would rather become part of a (subaltern) workforce; their ‘normalisation’ would entail the ‘disarticulation’ of their social structure and culture. According to reports, the rehabilitation of a race would be best carried out through control over childhood with a view to creating a ‘new generation’.30 This repertoire is re-enacted in the film. On the one hand, the sequence fulfils an informative function by offering a convincing depiction of the endeavours of the missions in the Amazon. This sequence also fills significant narrative gaps: it provides the spectator with a visual explanation for Manduca’s scars and an elucidation regarding Karamakate’s childhood. However, its function goes well beyond this, serving to stage and subvert asymmetrical relations between the oppressed and their oppressors. The subversion is articulated through the characters of Karamakate and Manduca. When the friar states that the mission’s aim is to save the souls of those children made orphans by the rubber war and to rescue them from ‘cannibalism and ignorance’, Karamakate, in a highly symbolic gesture, stands up and leaves the table. The camera foregrounds his rejection of the Eurocentric civilizing discourse by framing his fierce body language and following him along the path that leads him outside. Once there, he carries out an act of deculturalization. He speaks

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to a group of children in their language, tells them about their origins and ancestors, and teaches them the names and functions of the plants as well as of the native rituals and mythology connected to them. He also reveals that he has suffered from similar experiences. This sequence displays several issues: Karamakate inverts the act of naming entailed in the work of colonial botany by ‘erasing’ colonial plant names and replacing them with the native ones; he also restores the original function of the plants. Ultimately, this action of deculturalization serves to counteract the forced acculturation practised by the missionaries. Indeed, the film addresses the issue of cross-cultural interaction from the start. When they meet, Karamakate accuses Manduca and his people of surrendering to the whites; later, he accuses him of being a caboclo, of having lost his culture and serving the oppressor.31 In that sense, these Indigenous characters might seem to embody, rather schematically, two different approaches to cultural contact. In Karamakate’s view, Manduca is a traitor to his original culture. In contrast, Karamakate would represent Indigenous resistance to cultural, political and economic subjugation. Indeed, he embodies Indigenous resistance when he tells the children in the mission: ‘never forget who you are or where you come from’ and ‘do not let our song fade away’. Even so, the film’s ideology is not as simplistic as this might make it seem. Firstly, the character of Karamakate is more nuanced. Perhaps in a contradictory way, he embodies both culture preservation and the defence of the right of Indigenous people to incorporate change. After hearing the missionary abusively punishing the group of children, Manduca too carries out an act of resistance/rebellion by hitting the Capuchin. He and Karamakate free the children; however, since they need to continue their journey and the children might be killed by their peers loyal to the friar, Karamakate encourages them to escape. While this seems to be an act of liberation from oppression, the spectator knows that the children will most probably die since they are left alone in the jungle without their traditional knowledge or know-how; the awareness of the children’s inevitable fate is rendered visually by the hesitance of the three characters. The film seems to expose a problem, namely how difficult it is to deal with processes of deculturation, acculturation, transculturation and cultural preservation. It is not by chance that the mission is located at La Chorrera, today a town in the Amazonas department, but which was once an important rubber station at the turn of the century. Roger Casement’s Amazon Journal devotes a chapter to it. As is now well-known, the rubber trade in

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the Amazon was built on the extremely violent abuse, torture and other atrocities perpetrated against the native population. The main rubber company in the region was the Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company (later re-named Peruvian Amazon Company), which operated in the area of the Putumayo river in the Colombian southern borders, where La Chorrera was located. The company was directed by the Peruvian Julio César Arana, with a British Board of Directors. The North American W.E. Hardenburg was among the first people to denounce the abuses, which he himself witnessed. His accusations eventually led the British government to send a commission of inquiry led by Roger Casement to investigate the abuses in 1910. The company subsequently closed down in 1913. The film’s cinematography highlights the link between La Chorrera and rubber exploitation: when the canoe reaches the area, a shot of a plaque alerts us to the historical significance of the place. The plaque reads: ‘In recognition of the Colombian rubber pioneers who brought civilization to the land of cannibal savages and showed them the path of God and his Holy Church. Rafael Reyes. President of Colombia, August of 1907’. The denunciation of the rubber industry’s atrocities is also articulated in the character of a rubber victim who, having been grossly mutilated, implores Manduca to shoot him, which he eventually does. The plaques and the mutilated Indigenous body are, according to Pedro Adrián Zuluaga, alongside the marked rubber trees and the other scarred Indigenous bodies, examples of how the jungle is not depicted as a nature deprived of history but rather as a nature that has been ‘intervened, written and re-written’.32 The film highlights how such interventions have been carried out by, and in the name of, some of the pillars of colonial power—the Church, the State and capitalism—through exploitation, torture and, especially, the creation of a culture of terror. Moreover, by symbolically uniting two different historical processes of violent oppression, the film seems to suggest that, as Michael Taussig notes in relation to the rubber trade, a culture of terror did not only function in the service of an immediate visible goal (rubber, Christianization) but also, and more basically, the hegemony of Western over non-Western subjects generally.33 The presence of the rubber victim suggests that this hegemony was a process marked by dehumanizing acts of violence; the dehumanization being rendered indexically through the mutilated human body and brought to the fore through the act of killing him. In the diegesis, this culminating act is presented as one of extreme empathy, while at the same time as an oxymoron of humanity.

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The sequences I have just discussed show also how the film shifts from humanity to human rights. These sequences and the overall historical framework of (neo)colonialism, abuse and genocide pose the notion of humanity not only in philosophical or relational terms, but also in terms of rights and their violation. Unlike the other films made by Guerra and Gallego, El abrazo de la serpiente engages with human rights culture and can be understood as an example of rights-promoting storytelling, that is, of narratives that ‘strive to further justice’.34 Human rights culture is a contested terrain. While for some commentators human rights activism is, notwithstanding its limitations, ‘the most we can hope for’ as a tool to combat universal suffering and abuses, as Michael Ignatieff puts it,35 others advocate for a critical engagement with its discourse. Wendy Brown takes issues with Ignatieff’s posture claiming that while human rights activism presents itself as an apolitical project it is in fact a very specific moral-political project, one focussed on suffering rather than comprehensive justice and which ‘competes with, rejects and displaces’ other political possibilities.36 Even more problematic is human rights culture in postcolonial and Indigenous contexts, for it is rooted in Eurocentric notions of freedom, individualism, universalism and humanity. Nelson Maldonado-Torres describes the coloniality of human rights pertaining to a notion of humanity ‘loaded with ideas about secularism, individualism and racism’37 as well as to activists who speak of the colonized’s rights instead of with them. Also controversial is that in human rights discourse humanity prevails over citizenship and ethnicity, whereas belonging to humanity is not the same as belonging to a nation, as Alcida Rita Ramos indicates.38 Rights-promoting storytelling in cinema about Indigenous populations may mirror the same conflictive implications. According to Michelle Hulme-Lippert, films that do not reject mainstream conventions might produce mere ‘issuetainment’, that is, while ‘attempt[ing] to foster global awareness regarding particular social issues, […] actually reify conservative values and hegemonic powers given their dependence on a global freemarket economy and entertainment-focused conventions’.39 However, films can also do productive work in human rights matters. In the case of Icíar Bollaín’s También la lluvia (2010), for example, Hulme-Lippert argues that the film shows the ‘difficulties inherent to rights-promoting endeavours’ via its staging of ‘imperfection’ and its interrogation of ‘ethical attempts at representing and opposing injustice without furthering it’.40 Considering El abrazo de la serpiente as part of human rights culture

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might open profitable conversations on the possibilities as well as limitations of cinematic rights-promoting storytelling and also, as I shall explain, on cinematic decolonization. In order to support my argument, it is worth considering the origins of human rights discourses, whose current form dates back to the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), proclaimed in the aftermath of the horrors of the Second World War. The philosophical notion of the ‘Rights of Man’ is in fact part of a larger humanistic endeavour to separate the human from the divine and the animal realm lying at the core of ‘Western consciousness’ which can be traced throughout Western history.41 While the antecedents of the modern notion of ‘human rights’ are the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen and the 1776 US Declaration of Independence, those of the notion of ‘human’ are to be found as far back as the Renaissance. Humanist treatises such as Giovanni’s Pico della Mirandola’s 1486 De hominis dignitate [Oration on the Dignity of Man], advanced a definition of the human being on the basis of its separation from the divine and the animal realms. As Maldonado-Torres explains, the Western notion of human that underpins human rights discourse, and that became dominant in the West, is based on a ‘colonial or colour-line that makes it possible to distinguish humans from non-humans and to think of humanity in terms of degrees – that one can be more or less human’. This is the same line underpinning Eurocentric onto-Manichaean divides between good and evil, civilized and uncivilized.42 How, then, is it possible for human rights discourse to be useful or profitable in postcolonial contexts given the coloniality shaping the pillars of modern human rights culture? Alcida Rita Ramos suggests we replace humanity with citizenship, and the universalism and similarity invoked by human rights declarations with ‘rightful difference’ and ‘equivalence’.43 Boaventura de Sousa Santos advocates for a ‘localization’ of human rights projects and a transcultural mestizo conception of human rights, which should be ‘a constellation of local and mutually intelligible meanings’.44 Álvaro Diego Herrera Arango’s case study of the Witoto people in the Colombian province of Leticia offers an example of those ‘other’ political possibilities indicated by Brown which could adapt rights-promoting endeavours to local cultures.45 Finally, Maldonado-Torres advocates for the decolonization of human rights and signals Frantz Fanon’s notion of the damnés [the damned] as a possible point of departure for its challenge to the Western hegemonic notion of the human. The notion of

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damnation offers a useful entry to our film. Damnation is a form of colonial and Eurocentric (or, in the words of Maldonado, onto-Manichean) differentiation that includes, but goes beyond, race. The damnés are those colonized entities ‘whose very existence is regarded as problematic and dangerous’ which ‘would disappear after their bodies are used to build civilization and to satisfy the needs of the civilized. In the worst case scenario, the condemned remain alive but only outside of the zone of civilization, or having limited access to it’.46 Maldonado-Torres suggests that damnation is the starting point whereby Fanon considers a decolonized notion of the human: one centred on the body as a site of questions and as ‘the open dimension of every consciousness’,47 a body liberated from the mask of mimicry. Ultimately, Fanon argues for a ‘new humanity’, ‘a new man’ since, as Lewis Gordon puts it, ‘[h]umanisation is, for Fanon, a fight against damnation’.48 Scrutinizing Guerra and Gallego’s film in light of the decolonization of the notion of the human and of Fanon’s damnation might shed light on the achievements as well as shortcomings of their project. The encounter with the rubber victim and the discourse of the capuchin shows that colonization drove certain human beings outside the sphere of human relations, that is, into the sphere of damnation. Like the damné invoked by Fanon, the Indigenous/colonized subject takes action. Manduca frees the children; Karamakate metaphorically takes away their ‘white mask’. The collective struggle advocated by Fanon is no longer possible here since the Indigenous population has been eliminated, but another possibility is suggested by the film: an alliance between the Indigenous and the wise white men, upon recognition of the ‘other’ as an equivalent human being. A ‘new practice of being human’49 is thus suggested which is in line with the thematic concerns of the duo’s earlier work: as evidenced in their previous films, this practice involves respect, knowledge and friendship. In addition to exposing how Western powers have pushed the colonized subject into the sphere of damnation, the film engages critically with the very notion of race understood as a technology of domination. As such, race can be identified with the principal axis of the Eurocentric model of power that developed with colonialism and the constitution of ‘America’ and hence, what Anibal Quijano has referred to as the ‘coloniality of power’.50 As I explained earlier, the characterization of the young Karamakate counters the colonialist narrative of native people being inferior, lacking and backward savages. We could even say that

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the relationship between Karamakate and Theo offers an example of a reverse ethnography, in which the native no longer holds the position of the object of study but that of subject; the native thus possesses knowledge and all those attributes denied by imperialist discourses. In fact, the displacement of the grammar of lack is part of a broader displacement in the positioning of knowledge (Fig. 4.2). There are two sequences in which El abrazo de la serpiente exhibits this dislocation while also challenging the Eurocentric paternalism embedded in the ideas of the noble savage and primitivism. The first depicts the encounter between the Indigenous subjects and Western technology— photography—an encounter that is inevitably problematic since it recalls the material and symbolic signs of Western civilization and the hierarchies embedded in the history of colonialism and early anthropology. When the young Karamakate sees his image on Theo’s photographic plate his first reaction is to keep it as it is ‘him’. However, after Theo explains that it is an image, Karamakate is not portrayed as either speechless or surprised, that is, as lacking the necessary knowledge to understand what is before

Fig. 4.2 Karamate, Manduca and Theo in a still from El abrazo de la serpiente. (Courtesy of Peccadillo Pictures)

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him. Maintaining the same fierce pose that he has adopted throughout the film, Karamakate performs another act of translation, understood in its broad meaning of transposition of one set of signs into another and as an act of cultural rendition. Karamakate ‘interprets’ Western technology and translates it into his own language and cosmogony. He reads the photograph as a chullachaki, an empty human being. This act of cultural translation undermines the ‘primitiveness’ of the native and deconstructs the colonialist belief in the superiority of Western technology/modernity. Furthermore, it challenges the hierarchies embedded in the ethnographic encounter. The asymmetrical relationship of anthropologist and native subject as ‘observer’ and ‘observed’ is replaced with an intersubjective communication between two interlocutors, which undermines the ‘otherness’ of the native typically constructed, as Fabian has demonstrated, in anthropological accounts.51 Although the natives in this film are depicted as historically oppressed by the white man, Karamakate is not represented as a subaltern figure but rather as one able to counter such colonial ideas of superiority with Indigenous mythologies and beliefs. The native shaman symbolizes a whole civilization, which is represented equally, if not more complexly, than Western civilization. The second sequence in which Eurocentric notions of primitivism are challenged, is more explicit. During their journey, Karamakate, Manduca and Theo receive hospitality from a local native community, one Theo already knows. When the three set out to leave, Theo realizes that the natives have kept his compass. He accuses them of stealing it and tries to get it back but is stopped by Manduca and eventually agrees to leave. Through the subsequent dialogue between the ethnographer and Karamakate, we understand that Theo’s concern was not the loss of the instrument but rather the loss of native ancient knowledge that use of the foreign technology would entail. When Theo explains this to Karamakate, the latter suggests the scientist is being paternalistic, saying he cannot prevent them from learning and that white men do not possess a monopoly on knowledge. This scene mobilizes ideologies and identifications. The Western spectator identifies with Theo—his misinterpretation of the act of exchange/stealing and his genuine concern with the natives’ ‘authenticity’. However, all these ideas are shattered by Karamakate’s words, which reveal Theo’s ethnographic paternalism and challenge the notion of a monopoly on knowledge, just as they do a monopoly on language. But, more importantly, Karamakate’s words are also a critique of essentialist notions of indigeneity that freeze Indigenous cultures in

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the past and recommend preservation, and of the ‘salvage idiom [that] attempted to repress signs of change’ in those cultures, which draws on the idea that ‘values originating elsewhere are polluting of some reified notion of culture and innocence’.52 ‘Coloniality of power’, as a concept, also allows a further reading of the implications of the scientists’ subject position of lack and vulnerability in El abrazo de la serpiente, especially in the case of Evan. Through Evan’s subject position of lack and dependence the film opposes the other main axis of the Eurocentric system of power: capitalism, that is, the ‘new structure of control of labour, its resources and products’ which was established with colonization.53 Capitalism is represented in the story by the rubber trade, its global dimension highlighted in Evan’s search for the yakruna for corporate gain. Thus, the film is critiquing not only specific episodes of the historical exploitation of Amazonian people and land, but also the structure of ‘colonial/modern Eurocentred capitalism’ and its racial organization of labour. The film opposes the Eurocentric hegemonic narrative of modernity by, on the one hand, exposing its technologies of domination, and, on the other hand, by displaying alternative systems of signification and organization of the world. The critique of ‘colonial/modern Eurocentred capitalism’ is also perhaps an example of the existing, albeit certainly frail, inquiries into the present prompted by El abrazo de la serpiente since, as Quijano argues, ‘what is termed globalization is the culmination of a process that began with the constitution of America and colonial modern Eurocentred capitalism as a new global power’.54 Going back to Maldonado-Torres’s reflection on decolonization, I would suggest that this film goes further than just contesting the pillars of coloniality. It achieves this by displaying a non-Western notion of ‘being human’ and by foregrounding a fictional Indigenous episteme through the figure of the shaman and the characterization of the selva. On the one hand, as Bradley Pinchot argues, Karamakate’s teaching is an ‘epistemic challenge’ to Theo and Evan given that Amazonian shamanism and the yagé rituals ‘question the binaries of any universalising ontological system’ (such as the binaries death/life, human–non-human, reality–dream).55 On the other hand, the film displays a notion of the selva as a living being. This is evident when Karamakate sets the rules to which the scientist must agree upon agreeing to take him to the yakruna:

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The jungle is fragile. If you attack her, she strikes back. She will only allow us to travel if we respect her. We must not eat meat or fish until the rains begin and we ask for permission to the Owners of Animals. We can’t cut any tree from its root. If a woman is found, no intercourse until the change of moon. Do you accept?

Karamakate’s words give us clues about the relationship between nature and human beings proposed in the film. The very setting of rules of behaviour implies an understanding of the jungle as an ‘earth-being’, to borrow the term from de la Cadena.56 The relationship between human and non-human beings is not one of dominance but one of respect: the jungle is a being which needs to be ‘respected’ and is ‘fragile’. Interestingly, Karamakate’s instructions resonate with Tiapuyama-Antonio Bolivar’s words in an interview when he contends that if human beings stop exploiting nature, she will calm down. The Amazon’s ‘fragility’ challenges the Eurocentric representation of a nature that overwhelms, dominates and drives rational Western man to madness. Furthermore, Karamakate verbalizes its needs. His linguistic operation can be understood as an act of translation: he renders the non-verbal signs of the jungle into verbal signs; these are communicated to the Westerner as a condition of granting the latter access to the native world. While in Eurocentric representations the Euro-American character acts as a mediating bridge, here it is the native character who serves as such. This film does not eliminate the ‘otherness’ of tropical nature; rather, it deconstructs its colonialist attributes. In a way, for the sake of the European traveller, Karamakate is translating the relationship between the Indigenous subject and the territory, and, by extension, the sense of belonging to the land that is a defining feature of (the representation of) indigeneity. This belonging is presented via a relationship of respectful coexistence and awareness of the fragility of nature, which speaks more to current ecological concerns and processes of rainforest exploitation than to imperialist discourses. Further instances in which the Western notion of being human is undermined are when the film displays ‘human/nonhuman relationality’57 or the ‘agency of non-human entities’58 such as the tapir, the serpent laying eggs, the jaguar hunting the serpent, whereby the film embraces an epistemology that de-centres the human and the Western Cartesian separation between human mind and nature.59 The displacement of the centrality of the human and of Western epistemology through the figure of shamanism and the incorporation of the Amazonian myth

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(however reinterpreted for the sake of the Western audience) relativizes scientific knowledge, which, while not overtly critiqued in this film, is placed in a relation of equivalence to that of the native shaman. In doing so, the film performs an important operation: that of replacing Western epistemology with a notion close to what de Sousa Santos calls ‘ecología de saberes’ [ecology of knowledges] of which science is also ‘one’ among several possible knowledges; the ‘ecología de saberes’ implies acknowledging that there are ‘diverse epistemologies in the world, the recognition of a wide range of culturally-specific categories of wisdom that exist beyond the contours of traditional scientific’.60 By means of its critical engagement with coloniality/modernity and its foregrounding of an ‘ecology of knowledges’, the film enacts a number of decolonial gestures at the level of representation. Decoloniality, as Walter Mignolo explains, means to ‘delink (to detach) from that overall structure of knowledge in order to engage in an epistemic reconstitution [of] ways of thinking, languages, ways of life and being in the world’.61 However, I would suggest that rather than ‘doing’ decolonial work, this film exposes how arduous such an endeavour might be.62

The (Im)possibilities of Decolonization So far, I have focused on the achievements of the film’s engagement with human rights culture through its rights-promoting anti-colonial message and its decolonizing gestures in relation to the notion of ‘being human’ and epistemic superiority. I would like now to interrogate more critically some of the aspects mentioned and further features of the film, as well as its paratextual discourses, to argue that El abrazo de la serpiente allows a discussion of the limits of human rights discourse as well as of the difficulties inherent to cinematic decolonization. In doing so, I aim to trace the perimeter of the film’s ‘political’ work as a means for pondering what political work can be done and undone through fictional cinema, rather than simply as a means for minimizing its efforts. In order to elucidate this, I argue that there are a number of ‘blockages’63 (and I use this impersonal notion on purpose) that obstruct the film’s decolonizing potential. The first blockage is the discursive framework of ‘containment’ of the story of Karamakate. While I have argued that the film’s diegesis eliminates the notion of the white man as a cultural bridge between the audience and the Indigenous character, I would now like to examine

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how the paratextual device of the epigraph serves, not only as a bridge to the spectator but, more significantly, as a gaze onto and a form of containment of the Indigenous story. As mentioned earlier, the spectator encounters the jungle through its sounds transmitted while the opening credits appear on a black screen. Immediately after we are introduced to the sounds of nature, the following epigraph appears on the screen: It is not possible for me to know whether the infinite jungle has already started on me the process that has taken many others to complete and irremediable insanity. If this is the case, I can only apologize and ask for your understanding, for the display I witnessed in those enchanted hours was such that I find it impossible to describe in a language that allows others to understand its beauty and splendour; all I know is that when I came back, I had become a different man.

The sensuous activation (through sound) of the spectator’s embodied response is quickly ‘contained’ through the written words appearing on the screen. These are presented as a fragment of Theodor von Martius’s journal written in 1909 during his journey through the Amazon.64 In fact, as made evident by the film press notes, the fragment is an edited translation into Spanish of a diary entry (dated 1907) taken from one of Theodor Koch-Grünberg’s journals and differs very little from the original text.65 The containing effect of the epigraph affects the whole story we are about to see, for the latter is framed by a Western introduction addressing the viewer directly through the pronoun ‘tú’ [you]. Thus, an alternative spectatorial response is activated in the sense that the epigraph stirs the viewer to indulge a problematic imaginary derived from the ‘antecedent (and persistent) discourses of the Amazon mobilized through the source texts’.66 Despite the minimal changes, the very acts of selecting and editing the early twentieth-century text highlight and re-enact a set of KochGrünberg’s statements that reformulate the tropes of colonialist representational regimes. The caption represents Indigenous geography through the tropes of threat and desire, danger and wonder, on the one hand, and ineffability and the sublime, on the other hand. Together they have defined the New World’s land and tropical reality in European travel writing from the early chronicles to the Romantic writers and beyond. Reminiscent of these earlier narratives, the caption describes the jungle as a place of otherness, opposed to rationality: it produces ‘insanity’ as well

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as ‘enchantment’; its ‘infiniteness’ is associated with beauty and splendour. Its language reformulates a well-established repertoire of tropical images that had been articulated in accounts of colonial encounters to both justify the colonial enterprise and construct the ‘modern’ identity of Europe.67 Columbus repeatedly used the terms ‘maravilla’ (wonder) and ‘maravilloso’ (wonderful) in his letters and diary. In the sixteenth century, Bernal Díaz del Castillo held that ‘it was like the enchantments they tell [of] in the legend of Amadis’.68 Such imagery persists in the romantic depictions that associate the tropical jungle with origin, transcendence and immensity.69 At the turn of the twentieth century, when von Martius’s story is set—in the context of European formal and informal colonialism and the ‘rediscovery of America’ brought about by Latin American nation-building a century after independence70 — textual representations of the tropics were prolific in both European and Latin American fiction—from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) to José Eustasio Rivera’s The Vortex (1924) and Rómulo Gallegos’s Canaima (1935). As Charlotte Rogers explains, these works represent the jungle as the primitive other of European civilization—as ‘a timeless place, a “place devoid of history”’—although, according to Lesley Wylie, texts such as Rivera’s and Gallegos’s used those tropes to counter rather than support the dominant relations of power between Europe and Latin America.71 In the same years, a similar process of othering the tropical jungle was employed in modernist Primitivism. Among the tropes of colonialist discourse, of particular interest is that of ‘ineffability’, a notion that has been used to represent the Americas from the time of the early conquerors until the early twentieth century. If Hernán Cortés declared that ‘There is no human language able to explain its greatness and peculiarities’, the texts of the early twentiethcentury novela de la selva presented a jungle that ‘insistently overwhelms the traveller and his ability either to comprehend or to describe the tropics’.72 This sense of the ineffable prompted the ‘imprecise language of “marvel” and “wonder”’,73 which is found in both the early chronicles and in nineteenth-century documents and resonates with the aesthetic of the unrepresentable that informs the early twentieth-century texts as well as Alejo Carpentier’s concepts of the Real Maravilloso and American Baroque language.74 In addition to a specific rhetoric of wonders, that ‘impossibility’ also produced very powerful strategies of appropriation. The linguistic and conceptual impasses engendered by the encounter with the new lands led to political strategies of naming and fictionalization.

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As Beatriz Pastor argues in her 1983 seminal study of the narrative discourses of the Conquest, travellers encountered a reality that they ‘were not able to conceive of’ in real terms.75 Referring to Columbus, Pastor explains how he did not ‘discover’ but rather, drawing on a set of textual sources, ‘identified’ and ‘verified’ the geography, flora and fauna he had before him, thus fictionalizing the American lands and the very process of the ‘Discovery’. In reformulating Koch-Grünberg’s statements on the difficulty to describe the ‘infinite jungle’, Von Martius’s words re-enact the linguistic impossibility, or sense of ineffability, mentioned since the early encounters with the Americas. His words inevitably signal a discursive and interpretative route to take for the Western spectator, therefore ‘containing’ the subsequent polycentric effort of the film’s mise-en-scène. Containment seems an appropriate metaphor if we consider that once the story ends, another caption appears on the black screen directed, again, to the viewer: ‘This film is dedicated to all the peoples whose song we will never know’. The dedication itself is preceded by a further reference to the journals as well as a problematic statement which erases Indigenous epistemology and agency by affirming that the only worthwhile accounts of Amazonian people are those written by Western explorers. As Gleghorn suggests, the dedication articulates the motif of the vanishing Indian and like the epigraph, ‘invites the audience to identify with the explorers, and with the film crew, in the use of the first-person plural’, which has broader epistemic consequences: ‘The dedication at the end of the film emphasizes framing devices that condition the ways in which knowledge is represented’.76 It is worth noting that, in addition to reducing, deforming and fictionalizing the new realities, Columbus and the subsequent conquerors carried out political acts of naming. The linguistic act of naming was a performative exercise of power that shaped the imperialist venture. Ever since Columbus, naming has been an instrument of claiming territory and taking possession. The political implications of naming have been underlined by several scholars. In Evelina Guzauskyte’s synthesis, naming is defined as an ‘an act that first erases and negates (thus creating vast spaces of terra nullius ) and then invents a new world based on mental constructs rather than the physical reality’77 and hence, as a manifestation of power. In Columbus’s enterprise, naming was a ‘political act of appropriating and legitimizing as the names of places were inserted into what Stephen

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Greenblatt has called the European representational machinery’.78 As Greenblatt explains, for Columbus, taking possession was a performance of a set of official and public linguistic acts: declaring, witnessing and recording.79 Naming has been a crucial practice of dominance of both formal and informal colonialism. It was a way of appropriating not only territories but also nature more generally. For that reason, scientists were deeply implicated in European formal and informal colonialism—in what has been called ‘scientific colonialism’: ‘a process whereby the centre of gravity for the acquisition of knowledge about the nation is located outside the nation itself’.80 Whether coming or not from the formal colonial power, botanical expeditions mapped the South American regions before and after the regions’ independence from Spain. In the seventeenth century, new human sciences ordered ‘the varieties of humankind into a single natural hierarchy of difference and similarity’.81 Anthropology, for example, developed with European colonization of the non-Western world, participated in the colonial organizational system,82 and reinforced the epistemological basis of imperialism. Through the epigraph and the characters of the scientists, the film engages with the historical and political nexus between language, power and naming that has shaped the history of the encounter between the West and the non-West in the Americas. While the caption/epigraph evokes the linguistic impossibility generated by the encounter with the ‘discovered’ territories, and the subsequent strategies of appropriation/fictionalization, the characters of the ethnographer and botanist evoke the Eurocentric ‘rationality’ that became hegemonic with the colonization of the Americas.83 More specifically, it attests to the role played by the natural and human sciences in identifying and cataloguing the workings of colonialism. The film’s positioning in this respect is twofold. On the one hand, the scientists’ vulnerability and lack, and the deconstruction of the superiority of Western language point to a criticism of such a nexus. Moreover, the film is vocal in its criticism of (neo)colonialist extractive exploitation of the Amazon. On the other hand, however, the film’s endorsement of the Westerner’s ‘pursuit of knowledge’84 is clearly problematic. The second blockage of the film then is the representation of Western ‘epistemic extractivism’ in relation to Indigenous knowledge and the film’s pedagogical orientation. Colombian critic Zuluaga points out that, just like the texts of the white explorers, the film aims to be yet another totalizing ‘text of the selva’ for its aim ‘to explain, translate and create an

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inventory – just as the two white researchers who are its protagonists do – of a boundless, strange and provocative nature’.85 Along similar lines, Gleghorn argues that the film endorses the ‘heroism and fantasies of the explorers’ and it also enacts what we might call a cultural extractivism in the service of a narrative aimed at Western audiences through its ‘disguise’ of botanical knowledge and Indigenous myths; just as ‘botanical knowledge has been key to pharmaceutical developments’, also ‘creation stories themselves have been misappropriated, distorted, and repackaged for Western consumption’.86 While for Zuluaga the film aims to construct a foundational tale whereby the selva enters into a Colombian national narrative,87 for Gleghorn the film mobilizes a pedagogical discourse which explains Indigenous knowledge and culture to the non-Indigenous spectator. In that sense, El abrazo de la serpiente endorses a problematic knowledge-politics and ‘neglect[s] to recognize that acknowledging what we do not know—and indeed need never know—is an important part of the recognition of difference’.88 Crucially, Guerra himself has stated explicitly that the aim of the film is to represent the extractivist nature of Western contact with the Amazon: ‘The Amazon has always been a “Tower of Babel” of people from all around the world who come in the hope of seizing its resources, its wealth or its knowledge. We wanted the film to reflect that’. El abrazo de la serpiente seems to propose a moral and ethical differentiation between (neo)colonialist extraction (represented in the film by the rubber trade, the reference to sixteenth-century colonization and the evocation of present-day exploitation in the Amazon), on the one hand, and what some would call ‘epistemic extraction’ (of the Indigenous knowledge, represented by the yakruna/yagé episode) on the other. The latter is understood in the film as a knowledge transfer, a cross-pollination in line with the overall discourse of interculturality. Articulated by means of plot and form, this is a key notion in a film in which the mise-en-scène is also characterized by encounters, dialogues, exchanges, sharing. In terms of plot, both Karamakate and the scientists are depicted as wise men. Despite the scene in which Theo (together with Manduca) is framed as a figure of entertainment for the natives, the overall narrative does not operate as a ‘reverse orientalism’ or a ‘victimology’ that identifies Europe as the source of all evils.89 The Western subject and Western culture are critiqued but not ridiculed. Both the young and the old Karamakate critique the Westerners’ concept of possession and private property, for example. Similarly,

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in both stories, Karamakate accuses the scientist of bringing unnecessary luggage with the old Karamakate even throwing some of it away. However, in both stories this critique is juxtaposed with acts of cultural contact and dialogue. In the first story, Theo’s explanation of his material as the archive of knowledge and memory is not rejected by Karamakate. In the second story, the shaman does not throw away Evan’s treasured gramophone. Furthermore, the scene with the gramophone—although echoing previous cinematic representations—is another example of the cultural translation carried out by Karamakate to allow contact between two distant worldviews. Karamakate uses Evan’s knowledge and sensibility in relation to music to teach him about dreams. Although El abrazo de la serpiente engages very critically with colonialist and neo-colonialist intervention in the Colombian Amazon and with the Eurocentric system of power, therefore, it speaks more of dialogue between cultures than the oppression of one culture by another. The notion of interculturality is also epitomized by the film’s finale. In a symbolic scene, the shaman prepares the caapi and gives it to Evan, who enters in a hallucinatory trance state. This is the moment in the story when Evan receives the ‘embrace of the serpent’ that gives the film its title. The ‘serpent’ is the fictionalization of the anaconda from an Amazonian creation myth, which is explained by Karamakate and is at the core of the film’s narrative. According to Amazonian cosmology, the anaconda descended from the Milky Way to create human beings; it was then transformed into rivers and left the plants as gifts for the humans. Through the sacred plants, human beings can communicate with the ‘original beings’; when this communication takes place, the serpent descends again and embraces the inhabitants.90 Thus, the final ‘embrace’ symbolizes knowledge transfer, the reception of native knowledge by the Westerner and, hence cultural cross-pollination. In terms of form, this dialogic dimension is rendered through multiple sites of focalization. In the pre-title sequence, the camera positions the spectator in three key places thus constructing a tripartite gaze. First, we are placed at river level, within the jungle. Second, we are placed behind Karamakate, seeing what he sees. Third, we are placed on the canoe, with (although we do not know it yet) the Western ethnographer and his Westernized native guide. The second and third camera positions show what I have called the dialogic dimension of the film. However, it is important to stress that while both focalizations are present, the ‘Indigenous’ point of view is quite central in the narrative. This is achieved through the enactment of a ‘performative’ Indigenous voice,91 the centrality of the native

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(language, characters, cosmogony and nature) at plot and composition level, the ideological condemnation of colonialism and the deconstruction of Eurocentric discourses. The relation between the native world and the Western world that the film seems to advocate is therefore one of coexistence and one predicated upon an interaction between forms of knowledge. Following Guerra’s declarations, we might read this as a ‘humanist’ solution. However, such interaction has greater implications, which the film and the filmmaker do not seem to acknowledge. According to Zuluaga, Guerra offers solutions to the crisis of our society by means of myth: he is interested in ‘the transmission of knowledge and proposing the “return of the myth” as a solution to the crisis faced by his characters and […] our society’.92 The critic suggests that Guerra and Gallego’s cinema presents a ‘pedagogy of reconciliation’ which, in this case, is between tradition and (knowledge) transmission. Zuluaga’s notion of pedagogy refers also to the aim of ‘translating and divulgating’ the selva to the non-Indigenous Western audience, an idea that resonates with Gleghorn’s argument on the pedagogical imperative in Guerra and Gallego’s film, that is, its aim to ‘“teach” their audiences something about Indigeneity’.93 That said, the notion of a pedagogy of reconciliation is problematic for several reasons: at plot level, it implies not only that the Indigenous subject (the old Karamakate) is saved by the white man, but also that the Indigenous subject disappears thus enacting the trope of the ‘vanishing Indian’.94 More significantly, because it ‘invites the spectator to participate in an imagined community of explorers who have the right—perhaps even the obligation—to seek out and preserve Indigenous knowledges, legitimized in the film’s staging of Evan’s epistemic inheritance’.95 In that sense, it does not fully engage with present-day forms of Indigenous empowerment and the risks posed by ‘neoecologism’, ‘neoromanticism’ and ‘capitalist depredation’.96 Ospina expresses a similar view, arguing that El abrazo de la serpiente produces ‘a vision of idyllic, mysterious, and pristine nature in danger of disappearance’ framed by the ‘narrative of the voyages and dominant textual mappings of novelists and scientists of yesteryear’, and that it falls within the contradiction of a glorification of indigeneity which reproduces a Western epistemological lens (Fig. 4.3).97 According to Gleghorn, the film’s embracement of a notion of ‘universal knowledge’ and of ‘knowledge-transferral’ reveals a Eurocentric orientation since it facilitates the ‘deracination of myths, plants, and peoples […] from their source communities’ and ultimately ‘perform[s]

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Fig. 4.3 The old Karamakate and Evan in a still from El abrazo de la serpiente (Courtesy of Peccadillo Pictures)

a redemptive act vis-à-vis Western sources […] eclipsing the ‘recognition of difference’ necessary to subvert historical disempowerment.98 Significantly, such an endorsement of universalism bears a resemblance to the (Western) universalism identified with human rights culture; hence, the third blockage of the film is its endorsement of universalism. According to Ramos, the ‘humanist impetus’ of universalism is problematic since ‘taken to its ultimate consequences, [it] would entail the danger that it aspires to abolish’.99 In the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights, ‘universal rights of humankind emerged then as “the common ideal to be achieved by all peoples and all nations”. The human, faceless and devoid of cultural specificity, exercises these rights as an individual rather than as a member of a group, society, or nation’ which means that ‘beyond cultural diversity, a single set of norms should apply to all societies and cultures’.100 Interestingly, the same applies to the opposite of universalism, namely cultural relativism, ‘according to which no absolute values exist in the absence of a specific cultural matrix, and therefore each culture is sovereign in dictating its norms’.101 As Ramos suggests, both notions need to be nuanced through Tzvetan Todorov’s notion of ‘“universalism de parcours ”’ and that of ‘relativism de parcours’, and in fact replaced with those which citizenship and ‘rightful difference’.102 Ramos’s claim that universalism ‘leads to [Western notions of] individualism, to the supremacy of humanity, and to the hegemony of the generic human’

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seems to speak to the lack of recognition of difference suggested by Gleghorn. In other words, the human rights lens allows us to see some of the problematics at stake with the film’s humanist approach, which might not be apparent at first sight. Moreover, it reveals the film as a site that articulates broader complexities relating to human right culture. The film’s response to these complexities is quite the opposite of the staging of ethical ‘imperfections’ discussed by Hulme-Lippert in her study of También la Lluvia. El abrazo de la serpiente does not offer a problematization of how to deal with Indigenous cultures; instead, it offers a solution and a reconciliation of complexities. This is achieved by means of its narrative reworking of Amazonian and Western myths, its staging of a successful knowledge transfer from the Indigenous shaman to the Western white man, and also by means of the subsequent paratextual narrative on the film which was elaborated in interviews, especially after the Oscar nomination. During these interviews, the director, producers and non-Indigenous members of the crew formulated a heroic narrative of collective effort and successful endeavour in spite of the material adversities of shooting in the Amazon. Yet, at the same time, they omitted any discussion of the real difficulties in dealing with cultural difference. Both Guerra’s and Gallego’s phrasing of the experience reveal a sense of accomplishment which of course responds to the logic of film marketing but seems nevertheless a missed opportunity to speak about the difficulties inherent to films’ modes of production. Bearing this premise in mind, we might reflect upon Nilbio Torres’s comments during an interview on the difficulties of on-set communication between native and non-native actors who did not speak the same language. Even though Torres also asserted that this language issue did not affect his otherwise extremely positive experience, we get a sense of the ‘real’ imperfections at stake in the production of the film, which we often know little about. Hence, the fourth blockage is the totalizing narrative (in terms of diegesis) and the ‘accomplishment’ narrative (in terms of paratext) whereby the ethical complexities at stake in cinematic rights-promoting storytelling about indigeneity are concealed. The fifth blockage is the visual depiction of the selva. By means of the multiple sites of focalization, the film’s polycentric camerawork articulates a shamanic (focussing on Karamakate) and non-human (focussing on the selva) gaze which challenges the superiority of the Western gaze. Moreover, through its embodied spectatorship, El abrazo de la serpiente challenges the ocularcentrism of Western epistemologies as well as

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the dichotomy here/there that has defined visual and textual images of the jungle. Such a binary is also undermined by the positioning of the Western traveller. Both Theo and Evan already live in the jungle; they are familiar with it; they speak the native languages and even know, at least partially, the territory. Consequently, the diegesis complicates the motif of the Euro-American character as a mediating bridge between a Western audience and Indigenous character (although I have explained that this mediation is articulated via the paratextual framework of containment). In order to elucidate this further, it is worth examining the rhetorical conventions and tropes used to depict the Amazon in more detail. In her study on visual depictions of tropicality, Nancy Leys Stepan describes how the tropics have been constructed in the Western imaginary as ‘places of untamed nature, a nature pregnant with meaning, awaiting discovery, interpretation or exploitation’, often characterized by the ‘immensity of nature’, ‘transcendence’ and as a ‘primitive world’.103 If El abrazo de la serpiente deconstructs many tropes of Eurocentric tropicality—the ineffability and savagery of inhabitant/jungle, the link between jungle, cannibalism and femininity, the jungle as source of the Western traveller’s self-edification104 —others are not subverted. One example is the aesthetics of the sublime, which is reformulated not only in the already discussed epigraph but also through the film’s visual language. The extreme long shots and long shots of the canoe navigating the river and of the imposing Cerros de Mavecure, the aerial shots of the tropical vegetation as well as Karamakate’s explanation of the multiplicity of borders of the river, all configure a landscape of enormity, limitlessness, extraordinariness and grandeur. Furthermore, Haydn’s The Creation played on Evan’s gramophone evokes the meanings of origin and transcendence that are associated with the rainforest landscape.105 This visual regime coexists with one in which the jungle is a territory where the human subjects (Indigenous and non-Indigenous) move, which they inhabit, travel through, and know. Nevertheless, the sublime aesthetics does ‘contain’ the deconstruction of conventional imaginaries of the tropics. The sublime landscape also complicates the film’s engagement with decoloniality. El abrazo de la serpiente’s visualization of the Amazonian landscape follows the codes of a Western aesthetics of the sublime; however, the feelings associated with it and the response that the film aims to trigger in the spectator are not those of powerlessness or terror106

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typical of the sublime landscape (and as is the case with the epigraph). El abrazo de la serpiente’s use of the sublime would seem to share some characteristics of the ‘decolonial sublime’ as theorized by Mignolo and Rolando Vázquez in the notion of ‘decolonial aestheTics/aestheSis’. Like other examples of decolonial art, the film both exposes ‘the contradictions of coloniality’, and strives to ‘empower’. That said, the matter is more complex since, if the film aims to produce feelings of ‘indignation, […] hope, and determination to change things in the future’,107 it also contradictorily seeks to inspire ‘feelings of beauty or sublimity’108 through its (visually stunning) aesthetization of the landscape. In a way, the representation of the landscape follows the pattern that Ospina identifies in Los viajes del viento and recent Colombian rural cinema: a celebratory cataloguing of Colombia’s diverse landscape via a contemplative and aestheticizing gaze which is ‘complicit with the erasure of [the] historical and political densities of these territories, and the simplification of the complex history of disputes around land and inequality that have shaped violence in rural Colombia for decades’.109 El abrazo de la serpiente, unlike many of the films mentioned by Ospina, does grapples very explicitly with the history of abusive exploitation in the Amazon, but it locates this ‘history of disputes’ in the past and not in the present. The notion of the past is in fact the final blockage preventing the film from doing decolonizing work. As Indigenous practices and, in recent decades, cultural anthropology have demonstrated, indigeneity has always been a ‘complex emergence’,110 ‘a set of relationships; […] not a fixed state of being’111 ; but the extent to which El abrazo de la serpiente confronts the diversity of Indigenous societies and challenges essentialist notions is problematic. While I have argued that the film stages different, even contradictory, postures regarding cultural contact, which indicate the heterogeneity of indigeneity, it is also true that Indigenous people are represented as still ‘bounded by place and [are] anachronistic’112 or, at the very least, linked to the past, which evokes the Eurocentric evolutionary perspective, and that ‘loss’ as symbolized by the old Karamakate evokes a notion of ‘authenticity’, which is being contested by Indigenous agents and indeed cinema. The very placing of a story about Indigenous people in the past has been questioned by various scholars in relation to a variety of films.113 In El abrazo de la serpiente, the use of a black and white aesthetic would seem to further distance the story from the present while also again containing its decolonial gesture for it is a clear reference to the scientists’ photographs that appear in the final credits.

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Equally problematic, as critics have noted, is the filmmaker’s insistence that the film has portrayed an Amazon that no longer exists and can only be recreated in fiction. This utterance recalls what Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado wrote regarding his project Genesis: ‘My aim was to portray these peoples as close as possible to their ancestral way of life. […] I wanted to capture a vanishing world, a part of humanity that is on the verge of disappearing, yet in many ways still lives in harmony with nature’.114 Guerra’s utterance (like Salgado’s) reproduces a Western gaze and evolutionist perspective; it seems to ‘erase’ the selva that does exist and to negate to Amazonian people the right and agency to transform on their own terms as well as the complex negotiations and conflicts of present times. Finally, as Gleghorn maintains, it eclipses the film’s important engagement with the Indigenous peoples and actors during its production stage.115 These last two aspects are evoked by Nilbio Torres when classifying El abrazo de la serpiente as a film about the time of his ancestors. His statement, unlike the director’s, engages indirectly with the contemporaneity erased by the filmmaker. Similarly, Torres also revealed that people would tease him about wearing the guayuco or guarruma [loincloth] since no-one wears them anymore nowadays. His words point to more complex relations between past and present just as they hint at a much more composite reality behind the making of films such as El abrazo de la serpiente, which unfortunately is very difficult to grasp. These blockages should not obliterate the important cultural work of El abrazo de la serpiente, which I have discussed in this chapter, but I would suggest that they invite a broader reflection upon the issues of decolonization and decoloniality in cinema; these are radical operations that cannot be limited to the level of cinematic representation alone, but should involve a holistic commitment if they are to produce a re-distribution of the sensible as well as of epistemic hierarchies.

Notes 1. El abrazo de la serpiente: una historia para el mundo. Documentary. 2. Juana Suarez, ‘The Reinvention of Colombian Cinema,’ in A Companion to Latin American Cinema, eds. María Delgado, Stephen Hart and Randal Johnson (Hoboken NJ: Wylie, 2017), 319–320.

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3. The film was awarded several prizes at national and international festivals and was Colombia’s submission for the 2006 Academy Awards. 4. Steffen Hantke, ‘Monstrosity Without a Body: Representational Strategies in the Popular Serial Killer Film,’ Post Script 22, No. 2 (2003), 34. 5. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‘Monster Culture: Seven Theses,’ in Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 4. 6. María Ospina, ‘El Colombian Dream y los sueños de un nuevo cine colombiano,’ Catedra de Cine Ciudad Abierta [online] Julio 17, 2014, 88, available at https://catedracineciudadabierta.files. wordpress.com/2014/07/9-rec_33-34_mariaospina.pdf. 7. Oswaldo Osorio, ‘La sombra del caminante, de Ciro Guerra. Cine hecho de ciudad, violencia e imágenes,’ Cinéfagos [online] accessed June 20, 2013, available at https://www.cinefagos.net/ index.php/cine-colombiano/criticas-de-cine-colombiano/72-lasombra-de-caminante-de-ciro-guerra.html. 8. Luisa Fernanda Ordoñez Ortegón, ‘La historia impronunciable: conflicto armado y cine colombiano después de la Ley de Cine,’ Historik 3, No. 8 (2013), 4, [online] accessed June 21, 2013, available at http://revistahistorik.com/descargas/la_ historia_impronunciable.pdf. 9. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 10. Andrea Guardia Hernández, ‘The Endless Burial of Polynices in Jorge Eduardo Eielson’s Antígona,’ MuseMedusa 4 [online] 2016, available at http://musemedusa.com/dossier_4/andreamilena-guardia-hernandez/. 11. Guardia Hernández, ‘The Endless Burial.’ 12. Anthony Downey, ‘Zones of Indistinction: Giorgio Agamben’s “Bare Life” and the Politics of Aesthetics,’ Third Text 23, No. 2 (2009), available at http://www.anthonydowney.com/2009/ 03/01/zones-of-indistinction/. 13. Downey, ‘Zones of Indistinction’. 14. Pedro Adrián Zuluaga, ‘Nuevo Cine colombiano. ¿Ficción o realidad?’ Pajarera del medio [online] May 19, 2008,

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available at https://pajareradelmedio.blogspot.com/2008/05/ nuevo-cine-colombiano-ficcin-o-realidad.html. 15. María Ospina, ‘Displacements in the Plaza,’ unpublished. 16. Downey, ‘Zones of Indistinction’. See also an interview to the director on cine-latino.blogspot.co.uk, available at http://cinelatino.blogspot.co.uk/2007/10/entrevista-ciro-guerra.html. 17. María Luna and Philippe Meers, ‘The Films of Ciro Guerra and the Making of Cosmopolitan Spaces in Colombian Cinema,’ Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media 14 (2017), 127. 18. Other sources include Wade Davies’s The lost Amazon (2007). 19. A crucial role was that of native abuelo [wise man] and adviser Oscar Román, from Araracuara, known by Prieto, who had worked with Shultes. 20. Guerra, personal interview with the author. 21. Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). 22. Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism, 214–215. 23. Mary Louise Pratt, ‘Arts of the Contact Zone,’ Profession (1991), 34. 24. Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism, 189–190. 25. Tiapuyama-Antonio Bolivar played a crucial role in the translation and rewriting of the screenplay. He was the translator of the crew and taught the native languages to the foreign actors. See also Lilian Contreras ‘El diccionario de las lenguas no escritas,’ El Magazin Cultural of El Espectador [online] February 28, 2016, available at http://www.elespectador.com/noticias/ cultura/el-diccionario-de-lenguas-no-escritas-articulo-618566. 26. Contreras, ‘El diccionario de las lenguas’. 27. Amada Carolina Pérez Benavides, ‘Fotografía y misiones. Los informes de misión como performance civilizatorio,’ Maguaré 30, No. 1 (2016), 107. 28. Pérez Benavides, ‘Fotografía y misiones,’ 108. 29. Pérez Benavides, ‘Fotografía y misiones,’ 109. 30. Pérez Benavides, ‘Fotografía y misiones,’ 110. 31. In Brazil, a ‘Caboclo’ is a person of mixed white and Indigenous ancestry. The term refers also to culturally assimilated native subjects.

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32. Pedro A. Zuluaga, ‘El abrazo de la serpiente, de Ciro Guerra: el texto de la selva,’ Pajarera del Medio [online] Mayo 23, 2015, available at http://pajareradelmedio.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/ el-abrazo-de-la-serpiente-de-ciro.html. 33. See Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Taussig’s work examines the culture of terror that informed the practices of rubber collection and trade in the Amazonian region and the role played by shamanism and shamans in the process and practices of healing (of colonists and Indigenous people). 34. Michelle Hulme-Lippert, ‘Negotiating Human Rights in Icíar Bollaín’s También la lluvia,’ Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 25, No. 1 (2016), 107. 35. Quoted in Wendy Brown, ‘“The Most We Can Hope For...”: Human Rights and the Politics of Fatalism,’ The South Atlantic Quarterly 103, Nos. 2/3 (Spring/Summer 2004), 452, and also in Lippert, ‘Negotiating Human Rights’, 106. 36. Brown, ‘The Most We Can Hope For...,’ 462. 37. Nelson Maldonado-Torres, ‘On the Coloniality of Human Rights,’ Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais [Online], 114 (2017), 131. 38. Alcida Rita Ramos, Indigenism: Ethnic Politics in Brazil (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 97. 39. Hulme-Lippert, Negotiating Human Rights, 106. 40. Hulme-Lippert, Negotiating Human Rights, 114. 41. Maldonado-Torres, ‘On the Coloniality of Human Rights,’ 120. 42. Maldonado-Torres, ‘On the Coloniality of Human Rights,’ 122. 43. Ramos, Indigenism, 97. 44. Ramos, Indigenism, 72. 45. Álvaro Diego Herrera Arango. ‘Indigenous Knowledges and Power In Friction With Human Rights And Development Discourses’ (Phd diss., University Of Montreal, 2014). 46. Maldonado-Torres, ‘On the Coloniality of Human Rights,’ 123. 47. Maldonado-Torres, ‘On the Coloniality of Human Rights,’ 125. 48. Cihan Aksan, ‘Revisiting Frantz Fanon’s The Damned of the Earth: A Conversation with Lewis R. Gordon.’ Available at Verso (versobooks.com). 49. Maldonado-Torres, ‘On the Coloniality of Human Rights,’ 121.

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50. Aníbal Quijano, ‘Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism and Latin America,’ Nepantla: Views from the South 1, No. 3 (2000), 533– 580. 51. See Fabian, Time and the Other. 52. Gleghorn, ‘Indigenous Filmmaking,’ 167. 53. Quijano, ‘Coloniality of power, Eurocentrism and Latin America,’ 534. 54. Quijano, ‘Coloniality of power, Eurocentrism and Latin America,’ 533. 55. Ryan Bradley Pinchot, Dándoles Más de lo Que Pidieron: La Justicia Epistemológica en el Abrazo de la Serpiente de Ciro Guerra. MA Thesis. Cleveland State University, 2019, 5. 56. See De la Cadena, ‘Indigenous Cosmopolitics’. 57. Joey Whitfield, ‘Communicating beyond the Human: Posthumanism, Neo-Shamanism, and Ciro Guerra’s El abrazo de la serpiente,’ in Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human, eds. Lucy Bollington and Merchant Paul (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2020), 182. 58. Bradley Pinchot, Dándoles Más de lo Que Pidieron, 8–9. 59. Bradley Pinchot, Dándoles Más de lo Que Pidieron, 75. 60. Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Descolonizar el saber. Reinventar el poder (Montevideo: Ediciones Trilce, 2010), 50. 61. Mignolo, ‘Interview.’ 62. Here, I am paraphrasing Fabrizio Cilento’s argument in relation to the film También la Lluvia. Fabrizio Cilento, ‘Even the Rain: A Confluence of Cinematic and Historical Temporalities,’ Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 16 (2012), 251. 63. I am adapting Hibbett’s notion, discussed in Chapter 3. 64. Theo’s name is a reference to another German explorer of the region, Karl Friedrich Philipp von Martius. 65. The film’s press notes include translations of the original text followed by the author’s name and the date. The one into English reads: ‘In this moment, it is not possible for me to know, dear reader, if the infinite jungle has started on me the process that has taken many others that have ventured into these lands, to complete and irremediable insanity. If this is the case, I can only apologize and ask for your understanding, for the display I witnessed in those enchanted hours was such, that I find it impossible to describe in a language that allows others to

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understand its beauty and splendor; all I know is that, like all those who have shed the thick veil that blinded them, when I came back to my senses, I had become another man’ Theodor Koch-Grünberg, 1907. Guerra has made use of Theodor KochGrünberg’s published journals of his expeditions and collections of photographs/photogravures. Among Koch-Grünberg’s main published works, are Indianertypen aus dem Amazonasgebiet nach eigenen Aufnahmen während seiner Reise in Brasilien (1906) [Indian Types of the Amazon Basin], Zwei Jahre unter den Indianern: Reisen in Nordwest-Brasilien 1903–1905 (1909) [Two years among the Indians. Travels in North-West Brazil] and Vom Roroima zum Orinoco. Ergebnisse einer Reise in Nordbrasilien und Venezuela in den Jahren 1911–1913 (1916) [From Roroima to Orinoco]. 66. Gleghorn, ‘Filmic Disciples,’ 35. 67. See, for example Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters. Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London and New York: Methuen, 1986). 68. Quoted in Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: the Wonder of the New World (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 132). 69. Nancy Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature (London: Reaktion Books, 2001). 70. Wylie Lesley, Colonial Tropes and Postcolonial Tricks. Rewriting the Tropics in the novela de la selva (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2009). 71. Some of these works, such as Rivera’s The Vortex, were used by Guerra in writing the script. 72. Wylie, Colonial Tropes, 9. 73. Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature. 74. Alejo Carpentier, El reino de este mundo (Mexico DF: Iberoamericana de publicaciones, 1949). 75. Beatriz Pastor, Discursos narrativos de la conquista: Mitificación y emergencia (Hanover: Ediciones del Norte, 1988), 26. 76. Charlotte Gleghorn, ‘Filmic Disciples,’ 42. 77. Evelina Guzauskyte, Christopher Columbus’s Naming in the ‘diarios’ of the Four Voyages (1492–1504) (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2014), 4. 78. Guzauskyte, Christopher Columbus’s Naming, 4.

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79. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, 57. 80. Johan Galtung (1967) quoted in Diane Lewis, ‘Anthropology and Colonialism,’ Current Anthropology 14, No. 5 (1973), 584. 81. Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature, 6. 82. Lewis, ‘Anthropology and Colonialism,’ 582. 83. See Quijano, ‘Coloniality of Power’. 84. Gleghorn, ‘Filmic Disciples,’ 42. 85. Zuluaga ‘El abrazo.’ 86. Gleghorn, ‘Filmic Disciples,’ 40. 87. Zuluaga ‘El abrazo.’ 88. Gleghorn, ‘Filmic Disciples,’ 42. 89. Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism, 3. 90. This is explained by the director Ciro Guerra in an interview. See http://www.aarp.org/espanol/entretenimiento/expertos/annehoyt/info-2016/ciro-guerra-director-el-abrazo-de-la-serpienteoscar-2016.1.html. 91. See Clifford, James, ‘Varieties of Indigenous Experience: Diasporas, Homelands, Sovereignities,’ in Indigenous Experience Today, eds. de la Cadena and Starn, 198. 92. Zuluaga ‘El abrazo.’ 93. Gleghorn, ‘Filmic Disciples,’ 32. 94. Gleghorn, ‘Filmic Disciples,’ 42. 95. Gleghorn, ‘Filmic Disciples,’ 42. 96. Zuluaga ‘El abrazo.’ 97. María Ospina, ‘Natural Plots: The Rural Turn in Contemporary Colombian Cinema,’ in Territories of Conflict: Natural Plots: The Rural Turn in Contemporary Colombian Cinema, eds. Andrea Fanta Castro, Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola and Chloe Rutter Jensen (New York: Boydell & Brewer, University of Rochester Press, 2017), 253. 98. Gleghorn, ‘Filmic Disciples,’ 42. 99. Ramos, Indigenism, 91. 100. Ramos, Indigenism, 90. 101. Ramos, Indigenism, 90. 102. Ramos, Indigenism, 99. 103. Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature, 6. 104. Wylie, Colonial Tropes, 9.

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105. A contemporary representation of the aesthetics of the sublime associated with the Amazonian landscape and the notion of genesis can be found in the work Genesis (Cologne: Taschen, 2013) by Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado. 106. Malcolm Andrews, Landscape and Western Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 129–150. 107. Mignolo, ‘Decolonial Aesthetics/Aesthesis’. 108. Mignolo, ‘Decolonial Aesthetics/Aesthesis’. 109. Ospina, ‘Natural Plots,’ 253. 110. James Clifford, ‘Varieties of Indigenous Experience,’ 198. 111. De la Cadena and Starn, eds., Indigenous Experience Today, 11. 112. Gleghorn, ‘Indigenous Filmmaking,’ 167. 113. See, for example, Franco and Shohat and Stam. 114. Salgado, Genesis, 8. 115. Gleghorn, ‘Filmic Disciples’.

CHAPTER 5

Coloniality, Affect and Queering Gestures: Zona sur (2009)

The global distribution and ‘hyperbolic’1 reception of the Netflixproduced Roma has brought the topic of Indigenous domestic servants centre stage in debates about cinema and society in Latin America. Although images of nannies, maids and servants had populated the region’s visual landscape since at least the nineteenth century, it is undeniable that in more recent times there has been an increasing interest of filmmakers in the complex dynamics of affect and exploitation that shapes such ‘intimate labour’.2 Miguel Salazar talks about ‘Latin America’s nanny-inspired cinema’3 and Deborah Shaw identifies a new thematic cinematic genre in Latin America exemplified by films such as Fernando Meirelles and Nando Olival’s Domésticas (2001), Lucia Puenzo’s El niño pez (2009), Sebastián Silva’s La nana (2009), Gabriel Mascaro’s documentary Doméstica (2012), Andrés Clariond’s Hilda (2014), Rodrigo Moreno’s Réimon (2014), Anna Muylaert’s Que Horas Ela Volta (2015), Teresa Suárez’s ¿Qué le dijiste a Dios? (2014) as well as La teta asustada.4 The recent publication of Domestic Labor in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema, edited by Elizabeth Osborne and Sofía Ruiz-Alfaro, attests to the current wave of filmic depictions of maids and servants. As discussed in Chapter 2, Roma generated a debate over the political potential of its representation of the Mitxec-speaking servant which, I have argued, revealed the situated nature of spectatorship. The film’s reception in academic circles mirrors the hierarchies existing in Latin © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. C. D’Argenio, Indigenous Plots in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93914-4_5

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America film culture. If the pluri-awarded Roma was welcomed by an immediate response, other films on a similar subject did not appear on the academic radar.5 The same year in which Cuarón’s film reached the television screens of family homes across the globe, the powerful Xquipi’ Guie’dani / El ombligo de Guie’dani (2018), by Xavi Sala, was also released in Mexico. Xquipi’ Guie’dani / El ombligo de Guie’dani tells the story of a Zapotec Indigenous maid, who, along with her teenage daughter, moves from a rural village to Mexico City to work for a wealthy family. Spoken partially in Zapotec, the film is an unsentimental and non-aestheticized denunciation of the discrimination that lies beneath the façade of family belonging and intimacy in the houses were the empleadas work. In a telling scene, when the young rebel Guie’dani is asked by a friend what she wants to be when she is older, she replies, ‘anything but a domestic worker’. Like Roma and those other films, Zona sur, the film that I examine in this chapter, portrays the dynamics of ‘intimacy and distance’6 that govern domestic labour and its cinematic representation, while underscoring the insufficiency of the category of subalternity to account for the complicated combination of labour, love, race and class conflict that informs the relationship between domestic workers and masters. That said, Valdivia’s film, like Sala’s, is more audacious than previous representations, both in the depiction of domestic labour and in its political message. While Sala’s narrative focuses on socio-racial exploitation, Zona sur conveys a nuanced insistence on the notion of intimacy and trust so central to representations of domestic servants and to such an extent that the coloniality and affect of domination that still shapes domestic relationships in contemporary Bolivia are unmasked; a coloniality which is articulated in the film in fields as diverse as labour, spatiality and food. Valdivia’s film also explicitly deals with politics by engaging with some of the consequences of the Bolivian ‘proceso de cambio’ [process of change] initiated by Evo Morales’s government in 2006. Zona sur is Valdivia’s fourth film and, he has claimed, his most personal one.7 After the commercial hits Jonás y la ballena rosada [Jonah and the Pink Whale] (1995) and American Visa (2005), the filmmaker turned to a more authorial style and to topics related to the intersections of race, class and gender in contemporary Bolivia. In that sense, when understood as a cinematic exploration of the dynamics of ‘white’ privilege and Indigenous exploitation which informed the filmmaker’s own upbringing, Zona sur might in fact be considered the first part of a trilogy since he

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followed it up with two thematically germane films: a compelling road movie Yvy Maraey. Tierra sin mal (2014), which focuses on the Guaraní population living in in the Bolivian Chaco as a means for exploring the Western desire to know, understand and explain ‘the other’ and the more recent film, Soren (2018), in which Valdivia offers an overview of Bolivia’s ‘diversity’. Zona sur won awards at international film festivals, including the World Cinema Directing (Drama) and Screenwriting Awards at Sundance, and the Screenwriting and Special Jury awards at Guadalajara. It did well at the domestic box office and was welcomed by Bolivian film critics who praised Valdivia’s aesthetics because of his departure from the country’s predominant commercial cinema and his concern with Bolivian ‘apartheid’. Film historian, Alfonso Gumucio, would even include the film in his chart of the twelve most significant films made in the country in recent years. Nevertheless, it has received only scant critical attention.8 Unlike most of the films discussed in this book, Zona sur does not tell an Indigenous story; rather, it locates the depiction of Aymara indigeneity within an interconnected network of relations predicated upon class, gender and ethnicity as well as of economic and affective transactions. And yet, as I shall argue, it provides a radical critique of coloniality at a representational level. Produced by Valdivia’s own La Paz/Mexico Citybased company Cinenómada and set in La Paz’s wealthy southern district (called in Spanish ‘zona sur’), the film tells the story of a family of jailones (as the paceño white upper classes living in that area are called) comprised of the mother Carola (Niñon del Castillo), who runs an unnamed family business in decline, her university student children Patricio (Juan Pablo Koria) and Bernarda (Mariana Vargas), her much younger son Andrés (Nicolás Fernández), and the Aymara domestic workers Wilson (Pascual Loayza) and Marcelina (Viviana Condori). Wilson—who, unlike Marcelina, lives in the house—is more than a mere domestic worker or servant, however: he is the mayordomo in charge of the family’s reproductive labour (housekeeping, cooking and taking care of the young Andrés), and is also the mistress’s personal ‘valet’, overseeing Carola’s personal needs, which range from selecting her clothes to assisting her in dressing and brushing her teeth. Through skilful aesthetic use of long takes and orbital motion, the film depicts the jailones ’ decadent habitus of coloniality within the context of, on the one hand, Bolivia’s centuries-old internal colonialism and, on the other, the socio-political

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transformations brought about by Evo Morales’s administration (2006– 2019), which affected particularly marginalized groups and the long discriminated Indigenous populations. By the end of the film, despite her social and cultural capital, Carola is forced by her economic instability to sell her home (a sign and symbol of the family’s social status) to her comadre Remedios (Juana Chuquimia), an Indigenous rich woman who represents the Aymara bourgeoisie that emerged in Bolivia over the last two decades.9 Particularly interesting is Valdivia’s choice of featuring a male ‘valet’, which, in addition to differentiating Zona sur from the dominant trend of depicting female workers, allows the director to delve deeply into the mistress-servant relationship in terms of a colonial legacy that crosses historical periods and geographical borders. Wilson’s characterization indeed dovetails with the description of a valet’s duties included in Victorian manuals of household management, which describe valets as living in ‘nearness of the master or mistress’, being their ‘confidants and agents of their most secret habits […], ‘subjects to their commands’ and demonstrating ‘polite manners, modest demeanour, and a respectful reserve’.10 At the same time, the characters of both Wilson and Marcelina represent features specific to Latin America and Bolivian society where domestic work conflates three key axes of ‘exclusion, discrimination and exploitation: class, ethnicity and gender’11 and has been, according to Peruvian scholar Alberto Flores Galindo, at the origin of the postcolonial consolidation of racism.12 The Aymara servants are an epitome of a Bolivia portrayed as a ‘racialized social system’, that is, a society in which ‘economic, political, social, and ideological levels are partially structured by the placement of actors in racial categories or races’.13 Moreover, since the origins of domestic work lie in the economy of ‘colonization, slavery and the plantation’,14 the wealthy white house of the jailones family becomes reminiscent of the colonial encomendero’s household. During Spanish rule, these households were required by law to have in-house servants and, in the Andean regions, relied on institutionalized personal practices such as the mita, postillonaje, pongo, mitani o coci, pulpero, etc.15 The servants included Indians, freed slaves, persons of mixed races or castas and white women; the majority of servants, however, were Indigenous women. It should be said that Zona sur is less about the individual character of the domestic servant and more about the social, labour and personal dynamics, as well as about the affective flows that inhabit relations in

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Fig. 5.1 Wilson and Marcelina in a still from Zona sur

the house. Axiomatically, it is in this domestic space that bodily encounters between the domestic servants and the masters (as well as between the latter and other racialized groups) occur, articulating as much as undermining dominant discursive formations and ideologies of family, domestic service, classism and racism. The aesthetics of orbital motion through camera movement renders such interconnection more visible. In this chapter, rather than offering a lineal argument, I shall mimic the film’s aesthetics by presenting a series of interpretations (of scenes, dialogues, formal features, cultural and political messages) with a view to explaining the important work done in Zona sur by a non-Indigenous filmmaker from a privileged ‘race’ and class, while engaging with Bolivia’s racialized system and socio-political structure. By analysing the cinematic articulation of the notion of affect of domination and coloniality of taste on the one hand, and the bodily encounters between the inhabitants of the domestic space, as well as certain effects of Bolivia’s proceso de cambio highlighted in the film, on the other, I argue that Zona sur offers a complex portrayal of the coloniality pervading contemporary social relations in Bolivia and challenges it via a set of radical gestures that involve the Indigenous characters (Fig. 5.1).

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Affective Textures As the opening credits of Zona sur disappear from the screen, the garden’s circular side mirror reveals a car arriving at the house and then, Marcelina, one of the domestic servants, closing the gate. The camera pans in circular movements that echo the round image of the mirror; Marcelina’s body appears in the frame but with only half of her head visible as an offframe voice asks her, in Aymara, to bring some herbs from the garden. The camera moves towards the house. At the back entrance, Wilson and Andrés (who have just arrived in the car driven by Wilson after the child’s tennis lesson) are joined by Marcelina who addresses Wilson in Aymara and the child, in Spanish. As they enter, the camera leaves the group and continues its panning, in a circular motion; it frames the garden, the external walls of the house and then, again, Marcelina, who is now closing the gate with the link chain. Match cut from the shot of the garden mirror to that of the round clock in the kitchen. The camera keeps making circular movements now in the kitchen, where Wilson is preparing the señora’s favourite dish, an ají de fideos [spicy chicken pasta]. Once everyone is in the kitchen, Marcelina’s words unearth the asymmetrical power relations at play in the house and their articulation through the architectural hierarchies of the domestic space. She enquires about the child’s presence in the kitchen thus revealing that the latter is part of a repertoire of demarcation between employers and employees; by being there by choice, the child reveals himself to be, in her words, ‘bien raro’ [quite strange]. To Andrés’s explanation that he is there because Wilson is teaching him how to prepare the ají de fideos , she replies that what they are cooking is not ají since it is not spicy enough but rather an adaptation for the q’ara [white people]’s taste, and hence, with her observation she emphasizes the cultural difference between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous population. On the other hand, the complicity and bond between the three characters and between Andrés and Wilson in particular (Wilson is in charge of the child’s daily activities; Andrés spends time with the butler in the kitchen; they both address each other in loving ways), introduces the affective dimension that shapes the (unequal) relationships between the inhabitants of the home-space. Indeed, domestic workers live and work not only in emotion-laden spaces, but in spaces inhabited by complicated and ambivalent affective textures. According to affect theorists, emotions and affect can be

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differentiated. As Steven Shaviro explains, emotions are recognizable ‘personal experiences or states […] attached to subjects or selves’; ‘affects are the forces (perhaps the flows of energy) that precede, produce, and inform such experiences’; affect ‘is pre-personal and pre-subjective; it is social […] before it is strictly individual’.16 As it has often been claimed, domestic labour exceeds the economical and the material by necessarily also involving emotions, moods and affects; however, one must go beyond ‘the emotional character of domestic work’ and read affects ‘such as happiness, servility, disgust, dismissal and disdain’ not as associated to the caring duties of the workers but ‘to our immediate bodily reactions and sensations with regard to the energies of others and our environment’17 ; indeed, as Encarnación Gutiérrez-Rodríguez claims, affects are ‘not just perceived as emotions and feelings, but as intensities, sensations and bodily reactions disturbing, but also stretching and reaffirming, power relations’.18 Bearing in mind the imbalance between affect and power present in the initial scene described above, then, the vast white house in La Paz’s southern district can be interpreted as an evocation of the colonial houses, in which ‘tense and tender ties’ whereby ‘relations of power were knotted and tightened, loosened and cut, tangled and undone’,19 shaped the relations between masters and servants. This is demonstrated in a later sequence in which the usual intimate dimension characterizing the interactions between Marcelina, Wilson and Andrés, acquires new connotations as it is interrupted by a (colonial) repertoire of affect and domination displayed by Patricio. The camera highlights Patricio’s interruption by framing him in the background shouting Wilson’s name and then showing him walking towards the kitchen. Here, he addresses Wilson with loving words and gestures (caresses, hugs); however, unlike Andrés’ attentions, they are unwelcomed and disruptive of the servant’s work. They belong to the ‘precarious affections’ of ‘unsolicited attentions, uninvited caresses’ that, according to Ann Stoler configure the ‘affect of domination’ that defined the human dimension of colonial encounters.20 As the film progresses, we see several examples of this type of affect. Bernarda’s gesture of sitting at the kitchen table to eat Wilson’s cake is a tender moment which reveals the emotional bond between the two characters; however, when she asks him, lovingly, to sit next to her, it is clear to the spectator that Wilson feels the obligation to do it. Furthermore, when Marcelina refuses to bring Bernarda’s friends refreshments from the kitchen because she has finished her working day and is already dressed up to leave the house, Bernarda tells

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her, in a warm tone, that she will not forget her refusal. Finally, Carola’s intimate relationship with Wilson makes him an ‘interlocutor’ who advises her but also allows her to withhold his pay for more than six months. These examples demonstrate that Zona sur goes beyond the portrayal of the servants/employers’ relationship as one of a coexistence of intimacy and distance, love and hate, degradation and care, which we find in most of the films mentioned above. Indeed, this film can be regarded as conjoining the politics of exploitation and affects of domination.21 This combination attests to the unique quality of the film given that there is a tendency to separate politics and affect in discussions and representations of domestic service, which examine either socio-racial oppression or the emotional complexity of this intimate labour. The ambivalent affective texture shaping the relationships between the characters also allows intercultural exchange as demonstrated by the child’s relationship with Aymara culture. Alliances between family members and domestic servants are far from unusual and although they can be strategies of domination they can also allow cultural encounters: for example, the colonial kitchen ‘where the criolla woman of Spanish descent and the indigenous woman met, became an important locus of mestizaje under the circumstances of unequal power relations’.22 While the female solidarity represented in films such as Roma is somewhat problematic in that it erases the asymmetrical power relationship between the characters, I read the child-servant alliance of Zona sur as a site of potential change. Reflecting the reality of childhood in many Latin American middle and upper-class settings, Andrés spends more time with the Aymara servants than with his own family. In the ethnically heterogenous Bolivia, Andrés is thus exposed to Aymara language and cultural practices. He listens to Marcelina and Wilson speaking in their native language; he speaks to the rural sellers coming to the house; he learns about traditional food practices, and, after hiding in Wilson’s car when the latter goes to bury his dead son, takes part in an Aymara funeral and eats coca leaves. It is because of this exposure that Andrés might even become a ‘transcultured’ subject, in a similar manner to Ernesto, the protagonist of Arguedas’s Los ríos profundos (1958), a white adolescent whose childhood experience in an Andean Indigenous community shapes his subjectivity and identity.23 The child in this film might also be read as a ‘figure through which the adult subject […] imagines transformation, a figure which is always available to be inhabited by adults and which permits the disruption of

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subjective and identitarian limits’.24 The child signifier is especially important in Zona sur as a conduit to the Indigenous world as shown above and, as Valdivia explains: ‘what is marvellous about cinema is that it allows us to enter different worlds and to try to unravel them. In my case, I enter the Indigenous world through the child who spends most of the day with the domestic help. There is an affective bond with and a sensitiveness to that completely different culture which he experiences on a daily basis’.25 It is also the filmmaker’s ‘theoretical resource’,26 exemplifying the role of childhood as a discursive formation ‘in the (adult) making of worlds’.27 Indeed, the innocence associated with childhood as well as the ‘child’s state of helplessness (motor, emotional or political)’28 allows Valdivia to address the complex fabric of the paceño social formation. This is achieved in a pedagogical manner when the boy asks Wilson what he wanted to be when he grew up and Wilson responds ‘panadero’ [baker] while Andrés wants to become a pilot; or when Andrés reveals that it is Wilson who sustains the whole household (‘If it weren’t for Wilson, this house would be a disaster’, he says); and in more subtle ways through affect in the episodes such as the above-mentioned scene in the kitchen. In Zona sur, the child figure is a ‘seer’ in the sense used by Deleuze because he is largely an observer of all that surrounds him and his gaze is foregrounded through the recurrent aerial sequences that frame him on the roof of the house. On a couple of occasions, however, Andrés in fact counters the child’s ‘helplessness’ by proposing changes to the family’s hierarchical order such as the preparation of the same dish for everybody to reduce Wilson’s labour. The main difference between Valdivia’s child-seer and that of Italian Neorealism examined by Deleuze, is that in this case the child does not observe, nor does he witness the important historical mutation happening around them in the present because the family attempts to prevent any transformation of the status quo within the household. The slippage between what is observed by the child (the servant’s oppression) and the changes happening outside the private space (the politics of Morales’s government) becomes a gap for the spectator’s intervention, who is thereby interpellated by the child signifier, not only through ‘emotion and identification’,29 but also through critical enquiry (Fig. 5.2).

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Fig. 5.2 Wilson, Marcelina and Andrés in the kitchen in a still from Zona sur

The Politics of Taste I now wish to examine the function of the ají de fideos dish to show that food is a key element of both the above-mentioned cultural exchange and of the film’s overall politics of race. Drawing on scholars of food studies as well as on Bourdieu’s notion of taste, I argue that, unlike other films where food is (only) a site of an affective and power situation between employers and employees,30 Zona sur presents the culinary field and culinary taste as sites of ethnic and cultural negotiations as well as of ethnic and social struggle.31 The ají de fideos (also known as fideos huchu, in Quechua) is one of the typical dishes of Bolivian comida nacional [national cuisine], a mestizo culinary tradition that uses native ingredients such as papa, quinoa and the ají pepper (Capsicum annuum) alongside non-native ones. Originally a humble or poor dish and, as such, ‘classist and clandestine’32 nowadays it is eaten across socio-racial sectors, has a day dedicated to it,33 and is part of what Clare Sammells calls Bolivian ‘haute traditional’ dishes,34 referring to the recent revalorization and recontextualization of Bolivian traditional cuisine. In a similar fashion to what has happened in recent decades in other countries, such as Peru, regional Bolivian dishes usually associated with marginal rural Indigenous sectors have been ‘recontextualized as elite cuisine to be served in venues such as expensive restaurants or diplomatic dinners’.35 Among the reasons for this are the country’s

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economic growth and the emergence of a new middle class which identifies as ‘indigenous or as “more-indigenous”’,36 the rural migration to the cities, and the work done by Morales’s administration ‘to symbolically elevate the importance of indigeneity [which] has explicitly included a re-valuation of foods traditionally seen as indigenous and rural’.37 As Sammells explains, ‘such recontextualizations are symbolically complicated. […] “Haute traditional” dishes may partially transcend – or at least blur – gender, class, and ethnic divides. But they often simultaneously highlight and re-inscribe those same fault-lines’.38 An example of such complexities would be the fact that, while everybody consumes the ají de fideos , ‘only a few declares that in public’.39 Valdivia has defined this dish as ‘the most delicious and most democratic [dish] of our national menu’, and its presence in the initial sequence is clearly an homage to regional cuisine. However, despite this alleged democratic nature, I argue that the ají de fideos is in fact part of a hierarchical culinary field articulated around the notion of legitimacy. As Bourdieu famously argued in Distinction, taste functions as a marker of class and, therefore, as a way in which groups distinguish (and compare) themselves from/to others: ‘Taste classifies and it classifies the classified. Social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make’.40 Taste becomes a useful instrument, then, to analyse power dynamics in heterogeneous societies. In this film, the ‘economic and social determinants of taste’41 reveal precise politics of class, race and gender. Food scholar Sarah Kollnig draws on Bourdieu’s notion of taste and Quijano’s coloniality of power to argue that Bolivian food culture is structured around a ‘coloniality of taste’, which reproduces colonial power relations. Among the ways in which coloniality of taste operates are ‘the selective appropriation of indigenous culture; the imposition of foreign culture; and the selective inclusion into the dominant culture’.42 Drawing on Kollnig’s reading, one can argue that Zona sur also presents food as a site of both social struggle and coloniality. Marcelina’s critique of the way in which Wilson prepares the ají de fideos discloses the upper classes’ coloniality of taste as well as her vindication of taste legitimacy: ‘This ají de fideos are not at all spicy, you are making them for the q’ara [white people]’ she says to Andrés and moves on to explain how to prepare it properly. Andrés’s subsequent request to Wilson, ‘make it very spicy so she won’t say that we are q’ara’, exposes differences rooted in the colonial past.

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The question of ‘who has the legitimate taste’ is a complex one and does not receive a straightforward answer in the film. For if Marcelina wishes to distinguish herself from the white people through her taste, Carola’s taste shows the complex recontextualizations mentioned by Semmel. She appropriates traditional cuisine by modifying its preparation according to her taste (with less ají and more vinegar). Her attitude might also seem to be an example of what Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui has called ‘culturalism’, a practice of the Bolivian middle classes who, in the context of the state multicultural agenda in the 1990s, ‘took up indigenous cultures as ornamental’, while obscuring ‘the contemporary realities of the Indigenous population.43 Nevertheless, her appropriation is not only an example (and strategy) of her coloniality of taste, but also a sign of the upper classes’ notion of identity and nation. As Carola explains in a subsequent dialogue with Bernarda, to which I will return later, the jailones are as originarios [native] as the Bolivian Indigenous population, and hence, heirs to a notion of ‘white’ identity which is bounded, like indigeneity, to ‘rootedness’ and ‘place’. The politics of taste are further complicated through commensality. Seated at the dining table, Carola, Andrés and Patricio’s girlfriend Carolina (who seems to be of a lower social sector than the host family) enjoy the regional dish, while Patricio eats a beefsteak and Bernarda some chicken and salad. Bernarda’s diet (imposed by Carola) reveals her mother’s discourse of gender which I will analyse in the following pages. In contrast, Patricio’s choice is another example of the upper classes’ coloniality of taste as well of the racialized and gendered nature of Bolivian food since he looks with disgust at what he calls ‘comida de cholo’[cholo food], preferring instead expensive beef, while also associating spices with masculine strength in line with a notion of patriarchal masculinity. Moreover, his food choice re-enacts the association of meat with higher social status typical of colonial times when beef consumption was a practice of the elites. If the future chief-to-be of a family of declining wealth refuses (at least in public) affordable regional cuisine and re-enacts oppressive colonial attitudes towards the marginal ‘Indians’; the young Andrés, on the other hand, lives in close contact with the latter, eats their food and even learns how to prepare it. Considering the potential transformation represented by the figure of the child in cinema, as discussed above, one can also argue that in the politics of taste lies a (utopian) potential for social change. This is confirmed by the film’s ending, which symbolically resolves class and racial conflicts through food and commensality: in the

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finale scene, we see all the main characters seated at the same table, in the garden, eating all the same dish (which seems to be the ají de fideos ); while the dialogue is muted and only extra-diegetic music is heard, we see the characters talking to each other and instead of Wilson and Marcelina, Patricio and Bernarda bringing the food to the table in a reversal of the hierarchies that the film has exposed.

Bodily Encounters Outdoor shot of the garden where a medium close-up of green plants fills the frame. The camera pulls back and shows Erica’s and Bernarda’s bodies on the ground, naked, intertwined, hidden from sight by the surrounding vegetation. The camera pulls backs again and moves away, in the usual circular motion. It then goes back to them. They are now seated on the ground partially dressed, communicating through words and no longer by touch. Bernarda asks Erica if she loves her. The bodily textures (skin colour, hair) reveal how differently the two bodies are racialized; as the spectator will discover, race is entwined with class: in a later sequence, Erica pressures Bernarda to leave the elitist zona sur district and move in with her in the less exclusive Miraflores neighbourhood. Urban spatiality becomes a signifier of social hierarchy. Miraflores is not as wealthy as zona sur and Bernarda is accused of being a jailona who refuses to abandon her privileged lifestyle. Bernarda and Erica’s ‘interracial’ somewhat conflictive passion is a visual evocation of the literary erotic rhetoric examined by Doris Sommer in her seminal study of Latin American nineteenth-century literature. In Latin American foundational fictions, romantic passion ‘gave a rhetoric for hegemonic projects’ and ‘private passions [were invested] with political purposes’.44 There are some key differences between those fictions and Valdivia’s feature, however. The former were written to reinforce a dominant ideology and were grounded in conventional discourses of reproductive sexuality: ‘The domestic romance is an exhortation to be fruitful and multiply’,45 and, where mestizaje was involved, this was a ‘figure for pacification’.46 Bernarda and Erica’s sexuality is non normative and is marginalized in a Bolivia still dominated by patriarchy represented in the film by Patricio’s defence of traditional masculinity and normative views of gender. Moreover, their union is clearly not an allegory of the criollo elites’ nationalist projects. Nevertheless, the notion of an ‘erotic of politics’ is pertinent to this film. Sexual desire can be a ‘force

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of change or would-be change’ especially in the cases of young characters and transgressive sexualities who might embody both the radical potential of desire and the idea of perceptual experimentation and openness as Deborah Martin claims in relation to the young female protagonists of Lucrecia Martel’s films.47 In Zona sur the erotic is indeed a force for challenging the status quo, although the transgressive element is less the lesbian sexuality and more the socio-racial crossing represented by the young couple. Carola does not seem too concerned about the daughter’s sexuality but strongly opposes her relationship with someone from a lower social (and racial) status. To her, Erica is a ‘birlocha’, a pejorative term that, like ‘chota’, refers to the daughters of families of Indigenous origins who have moved to the city; the birlocha does not dress in a way classified as ‘Indigenous’ but follows the western fashion of q’ara people. Carola’s terminology unearthes a racist and classist discourse still very dominant in Bolivia and beyond. Furthermore, the romance trope also unveils the contradictions of the jailona concientizada personified by Bernarda, who appears reluctant to match her progressive views with actions and leave the family house. The erotic rhetoric, then, is a strategy to deal with the habitus of the Bolivian upper classes as well as with off-screen discourses about race and social mobility. This function of the erotic is confirmed by the character of Patricio, who spends most of the on screen-time having sex with his girlfriend. These apparently superfluous shots signal the character’s hedonism so as to underscore his broader symbolism as a social cipher: the young superficial, racist, and oppressive jailón. There are other bodily encounters, three crucial ones between Carola and Wilson in particular, which create more transgressive situations that engage with body, race and social recognition. Ten minutes into the film, a medium close-up shows Carola’s bathroom mirror and her set of facial and body creams; the camera pans circularly to reveal Wilson in the foreground, at the threshold of the bathroom, and Carola, in the background, moving towards the mirror and the basin. She has finished urinating while Wilson was there, his back on her, and washes her hands and brushes her teeth, helped by Wilson who holds her towel, toothbrush and the other products of her cleansing routine. The camera keeps moving in those intimate spaces while the two go to her walk-in closet. Wilson recommends which bag Carola should choose while also giving his opinion on how she handles her daughter’s behaviour. In this scene, Wilson is portrayed as an interlocutor who can ‘speak’ and is heard, but also as somebody who is, at the same time, an extension of Carola’s body. According to Valdivia, this

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scene exemplifies the level of oppression exercised by the Bolivian upper classes: Wilson, he states, is oppressed up to the point that he is perceived as an asexual being. Such perception is in fact a negation of personhood, which becomes a safe erasure for a woman like Carola who imagines a future in which she ages in the company of her servant. Following the aesthetic and narrative of counterpoint, the same bathroom becomes a space of resistance and ‘reclamation’ of personhood in another scene. In the elegant majolica-tiled bathroom we observe someone taking a shower. The moistened panel makes the bodily features blurred. The water stops and the person behind the panel puts on a robe while the camera pans towards the mirror. As the figure becomes visible in the frame, we recognize Wilson in the ‘prohibited’ space of his mistress’s private bathroom, hence, infringing his ‘loyalty’. He wraps his hair in a towel and looks in the direction of the camera, his gaze fixed. Andean music is heard. Wilson moves to the mirror and, maintaining a sombre expression, chooses one of his mistress’s expensive foreign-branded facial creams and massages his face in what we later discover is his regular beauty routine. Wilson’s bodily gestures and gendered performance in the intimate environment of the mistress Carola’s bathroom shows the valet’s subversive appropriation of a space he is allowed to inhabit only as a ‘servant’; his crossing of the house’s architectural repertoire of demarcation re-signifies the colonial hierarchies-rooted intimacy and affect-charged proximity that govern his relationship with Carola and the family; his mimicking of his mistress’s beauty routine queers his gender identity and reclaims his personhood while at the same time questioning centuries-old dominant notions of beauty, taste and human worthiness. In his analysis of the film La nana (2009), Stephen Buttes states that the domestic servant’s gesture of trying on the mistress’s expensive clothes aims to ‘reproduce the illusion of belonging’.48 In Zona sur, Wilson’s use of the mistress’s towels and creams is an act of displacement and resistance as well as a performance of queerness. His gesture displaces the association between the servant and dirt. Mary Douglas demonstrated long ago that dirt is a constructive and symbolic figure employed to order and classify: dirt ‘is never a unique, isolated event. Where there is dirt there is system. Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements’.49 A domestic servant’s closeness to dirt (they clean the family’s filth) has engendered visions of their body as polluted, even more so in the case of black or Indigenous servants whose bodies are already seen

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as contaminated because of their race: ‘The dirt that maids clean further contaminates their already polluted bodies, thus imprisoning them in a cycle where blackness and poverty are associated with physical strength and corporeal filth’.50 By associating the servant’s body not with dirt but with cleansing and beauty, the film disrupts the colonial assumption that Indigenous servants’ bodies are filthy and contaminating, sites of physical or moral dirt (Fig. 5.3).51 Wilson’s use of Carola’s towels, cream and bathroom can be understood as an act of ‘mimicry’ in the sense employed by postcolonial and feminist theorists to address the agency of the oppressed. Homi Bhabha states that the colonial imposition of mimesis engenders mimicry, ‘a difference that is almost the same, but not quite’.52 For Bhabha, mimicry ‘produces its slippage, its excess, its difference, […] is, thus the sign of a double articulation; a complex strategy of reform, regulation and discipline, which “appropriates” the Other as it visualizes power’.53 For feminist theorists, mimicry is a way to resist oppression: ‘To play with mimesis’ Luce Irigaray states ‘is thus, for a woman, to try to recover the place of her exploitation by discourse, without allowing herself to be simply reduced to it’.54 Wilson’s gesture speaks more to this latter notion of mimicry and less to Bhabha’s, although it does engage with the very source of mimicry in colonial settings: mimesis. As the women described by Irigaray, Wilson re-appropriates that which has been denied to him

Fig. 5.3 Wilson in Carola’s bathroom in a still from Zona sur

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displacing the (dirty) place assigned to him. Furthermore, he transgresses the boundaries of colonial mimesis, charting prohibited territories and architectural spaces, reclaiming his personhood and Andean subjectivity (through music). The spatial dimension of his gesture is all the more relevant if we consider that one of the expectations from domestic workers is that they ‘should know their place’. Wilson’s mimicry also subtly challenges the status quo in terms of gender. The mise-en-scène of hair towels, beauty creams and body care embodies a ubiquitous gender identity that I understand as queer drawing on Judith Butler’s notion of queer as a rejection of normativity: ‘Queer is not being lesbian, queer is not being gay. […] It is an argument against certain normativity’.55 This notion of queerness has a great political potential. As José Esteban Muñoz states, ‘Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another word’.56 Muñoz’s argument fits particularly well with Zona sur: queerness is a ‘mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. The here and now is a prison house’.57 Through his queerness, Wilson rejects colonial-rooted oppressive notions of race, gender and social difference as well as current racialized and gendered thinking about the body. Later in the film, Carola discovers Wilson’s secret habit when, after receiving an unexpected call informing him of the death of his son, he forgets to clean up the tell-tale signs left behind in the bathroom. Her reaction shows anger and disgust: ‘I’ve bought him everything, I’ve given him all the comforts one could want, he has a bathroom with hot water, his own stove, curtain, he has cable TV, his own towels, the fucking idiot even has his own bloody slippers’, she says to Bernarda. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s notion of ‘stranger encounters’ and Butler’s interpretation of abjection, I would suggest that Carola’s reaction to the discovery reveals the old colonial structure of domination still alive in the encounter between the employer and the Indigenous domestic servant. From Ahmed’s point of view, the discursive formation of the stranger is not about ‘that which we fail to recognise, but as that which we have already recognised as a “stranger”’.58 Accordingly, it follows that ‘familiar bodies can be incorporated through a sense of community – being together as like bodies – while strange bodies are expelled from bodily space – moving apart as unlike bodies’.59 Hence, in this particular case, within a few seconds Wilson’s body is transformed from a familiar, likebody part of the family community to a ‘strange’ ‘body out of place’60

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that is now associated with dirt and disgust and, as such, perceived as ‘abject’. By turning the loved and loving Wilson into an abject being, the film points to the ‘exclusionary matrix by which subjects are formed’.61 According to Butler, ‘The abject designates here precisely those “unliveable” and “uninhabitable” zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of the subject, but whose living under the sign of the “unliveable” is required to circumscribe the domain of the subject’.62 In a postcolonial context, where the coloniality of power is still present, the film’s ‘embracing [of] the abject’63 means also rejecting the epistemological and ontological negation of the other that has constituted the colonial subject. Carola’s reaction to the ‘unthinkable’ and the notion of strange body enable further elaboration on the notions of degradation/care and belonging/not belonging which sociologists identify at the core of the relationship between domestic workers and their employers, and which film studies scholars have analysed in cinematic representations. Not only does Zona sur display the existence of such binaries and the notion that affect can be a technology of domination, but it also displays the movement from care to degradation, from belonging to non-belonging; in other words, it demonstrates how a familiar body can become an unwelcomed body. Once Wilson comes back from his son’s funeral, he is confronted by Carola who shouts at him because he had left the house without permission, and he had brought Andrés with him: Carola: Are you an idiot, or what? Wilson: You hadn’t even noticed. Carola: Is that the way you repay me? After all the trust I put in you? Nobody tells you what to do and what not to do in this house, Wilson! […] Wilson: Don’t raise your voice to me! Carola: I can shout at you if I feel like it! This is my house!

During the confrontation Wilson shouts back ‘¡Do not keep shouting at me!’ and lifts his arm to hit her. He stops when Carola covers her head with her arms. After a few minutes, he tells her that his son has died and they hug. This powerful scene shows that, in households where domestic servants live, agency coexists with subordination, but what is even more interesting is what this scene indicates about gender. Throughout the film, Carola is depicted as a liberated working mother who relies on

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domestic service to maintain the family’s stability. She has progressive views on sexuality: she buys condoms for her son and does not seem to be bothered by her daughter’s lesbianism. She displays both power and female solidarity when she asks Marcelina if her husband beats her and, when Marcelina asks her the same question, she replies that she would have not let it happen. Carola’s views on women and femininity are, however, also problematic. She forces Bernarda to go on a diet in order to develop will power, while stating that men do not need to do the same as their belly is sexy; she insists that Bernarda dresses in a ‘feminine’ way to show strength and status; she tells her sister that women’s liberation has been the worst thing that could have happened to them since they lost power. Carola’s attitude towards her sons is explained in the film in terms of ‘matriarcado boliviano’ [Bolivian matriarchy], a notion mentioned by Erica (who is a university teacher) and explained by Carola when she states that ‘we have brought up a bunch of useless spoilt brats’. Her words echo those of the director, who explains in an interview: ‘The typical Bolivian mother brings up the macho, she spoils him and gives him whatever he wants and that’s why she makes him weak, she weakens him and emasculates him. Meanwhile, the mothers are much stricter with their daughters and this severity makes the women much stronger’.64 According to Kate Maclean, the prominence of women in the film represents the contradictory coexistence of ‘matriarchy and machismo in Bolivian society’,65 of which another example is the central role played by women in the emergence of the Aymara bourgeoisie (represented by Remedios). Carola’s ideological combination of feminism, post-feminism and patriarchy, on the one hand, and matriarchy/maternalism and machismo, on the other hand, is a further element that crafts a multilayered portrayal of identity in contemporary Bolivia. Similarly, Wilson shows great complexity. His gesture of nearly striking his mistress does not appear to correspond to the oppositional queerness that I analysed earlier. It is a performance of patriarchal masculinity associated with the physical oppression of women. Subaltern resistance turns into patriarchal oppression in a spiral amalgam of contradictory and overlapping ideologies, conventions and coded behaviours that are no longer discernible, but intertwined within these characters and visualized by their bodies. In that sense, the characters embody the multi-temporality of a Bolivian social formation that, according to Aymara intellectual Rivera Cusicanqui, explains the complex heterogeneity of Bolivian society. Rivera Cusicanqui reads the notion

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of heterogeneity—which we have encountered in previous chapters— not in terms of ethnic diversity but in terms of temporality. In Bolivia, there is a simultaneous coexistence of different temporal dimensions— the colonial, the liberal (that of the nineteenth century), the nationalist (that of the twentieth century)—coexisting as contradicciones no-coetáneas [non-coetaneous contradictions].66 This temporal nexus, added to the conflictive phenomenon of mestizaje, the intertwining of the ethnic, class and gender discrimination in everyday behaviour, and the role played by regional social formations on the national territory, configure the ‘panorama extremadamente abigarrado’ [extremely jumbled panorama] of Bolivia.67

Aesthetics and Politics Film aesthetics is foregrounded in Zona sur. Colours convey the habitus of the jailones with white being the most dominant: the internal and external walls of the house, the furniture, Carola and Patricio’s clothing, Wilson’s uniform, the expensive bed sheets, all emphasize the colour’s allegorical meanings of purity and cleanness, as well as its association with Western notions of racial superiority. Composition is skilfully highlighted in the shots of the naked bodies in the garden. Other shots are carefully staged, such as those when the characters are shot from outside while trapped in the house; they are placed at the windows, each of them in a different room, looking outwards, hands on the glass. The most peculiar film technique, though, is the use of long takes and a circular camera motion that pans from left to right creating circuits that enclose the protagonists; at times enclosing their complete bodies, at others with their heads cropped from the frame, or as images reflected in mirrors; sometimes entering and sometimes leaving the frame. This motion establishes the parameters of the spectator’s orbital perception, which gives more prominence to the structure and less to the individuals moving in it. Long takes are often ‘“attention-grabbing spectacles” displaying the virtuosity of the filmmaker over and above the requirement of narrative unfolding’ as well as ‘signifier[s] of transgression’68 as has been argued in relation to the cinema of Alfonso Cuarón. This holds true in the case of Zona sur too. Valdivia has stated that he aimed to give centrality to form: ‘Hardly anything happens because it is constructed solely on the basis of a language, not on the basis of a plot or conflict. I freed myself from

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the tyranny of history; film is also a way to give form’.69 The transgression of conventional narrative is not a dismissal of the film’s content, but quite the opposite, as the director also states: ‘It does not tell anything, but it does touch on many of the problems of our society’. The circular camera becomes a sort of omniscient narrator in a way not too dissimilar from Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también (2001), a film in which the director used a ‘wandering eye’ or ‘straying camera’ to direct the gaze of the spectator towards the main themes of the film and to what the characters did not see: namely, the ‘real’ Mexico’s inequalities, which escaped the characters’ ‘field of vision’.70 Similarly, the camera movement in Zona sur recalls Cuarón’s ‘wandering eye’ in that it moves away from the characters, wandering in the domestic space of the house and its grand garden. That said, the camera focuses almost entirely on the interior and exterior space of the white house of La Paz’s southern district. The camera’s circularity drives the spectator’s attention towards movement and spatiality so as to frame the characters as part of a wider unity: trapped as they are within their bubble, they allegorize the jailones ’ response to the historical mutations happening outside the walls of the house. Valdivia’s aesthetics are informed by the work of the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk and, in particular, the topology of human life elaborated in his book Bubbles (2011), the first volume of his Spheres trilogy (1998–2004). Sloterdijk understands human subjects as relational beings, who live in affective-charged relations with others within a ‘foamy’ society, that he imagines as an aggregation of immunological ‘bubbles’. Individuals are immersed in bubbles and spheres, ‘interior spaces within which two or more individuals are immersed in a communal affect and “resonate” with the same mood’.71 A key space for the theorization of the bubble is the house: houses are secure places ‘that generate[s] a protective feeling of being at home, an inner world […] an immune system […]’72 or, in other words, a bubble. Depending on the level of social interaction and the complexity of relationship with others, the dwelling can become a ‘vehicle’ or ‘foam’. As scholars have noted, ‘Houses are always both immune systems and vehicles at the same time. It is this paradox of people’s wish to protect themselves against the world outside and their wish to re-create this world in miniature which makes the house such a complex and sophisticated place’.73 The characterization of Carola’s family draws on the notions of bubble, immune system and vehicle. The camera motion creates visual bubbles in which the characters move, but are at the same time trapped, as shown

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in the staged window sequences. The bubble of privileges in which the characters exist metaphorizes the upper classes’ rejection of the changes happening outside the house’s walls. Carola and her sons keep maintaining their lifestyle despite their economic decline. They are portrayed as feeling immune and protected from the outer world, from which they are separated through gates, high walls and windows. Within their confinement, the only outer space to offer escape seems to be the sky, which Andrés contemplates from the roof of the house in several scenes. Given that Wilson prefers to live inside the bubble than outside, this situation of confinement and detachment from the historical present affects him too. The only outdoor sequence of the film is the one depicting Wilson’s journey to the highlands to participate in the funeral ritual for his son. On the way to the village, he is stopped by a policeman who questions him (in Aymara) because his car is considered too expensive for an Aymara individual from La Paz. This scene shows the racial and social discrimination that awaits Wilson if he leaves the safety of his job within the house. As he tells Marcelina, his life in the village would be worse than that with his mistress in the southern district. The ‘communities of resonance’, that are the ‘constitutive units of the social order’ in Sloterdijk’s topology, do not consider the hierarchical heterogeneity of a country such as Bolivia. As one critic has noted, the bubble is the ideal space to which people aim: ‘people try to turn their houses into bubbles: intimate and enclosed places with simple social relations, which are embedded in safe national globes’.74 How then might such a harmonious and utopian model of human relations be applied to the hierarchical Bolivian social system reflected in the film? The film shows that the security of the bubbles as immune spaces is based on the exploitation of the marginalized, and that such security is due to implode and/or explode either because of the employers’ authoritative practices (as demonstrated by the scene between Carola and Wilson) or because of the alteration of the country’s social and political order. The aesthetics of the bubble then, in addition to visually articulating the upper class’s habitus, serves to show the rupture of a centuries-long system of oppression that was underway by 2009, when the film was released. In 2006, the self-declared socialist and anti-imperialist, Evo Morales, became the first Indigenous president of Bolivia. Backed by a strong grassroots mobilization the former cocalero [coca leaves farmer] and community activist, announced that his most fundamental priority was to seek ‘equality and justice; to repair the damage of five hundred

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years of colonization [and] to change the Western economic rules that cause so much damage to Mother Earth and the planet’.75 During his fourteen years in power, Morales and his MAS party promulgated a new constitution (2009) that defined Bolivia as a secular Pluri-national State, declared natural resources the property of the Bolivian people and passed a law on the rights of Mother Earth. Even so, Morales’s administration was not able to ‘usher in the profound transformation of the economic and political structures that so many Bolivians struggled for’,76 and was later criticized for supporting capitalist extraction while making instrumental use of indigeneity. There is no doubt, however, that his ‘process of change’ dramatically improved living standards for marginalized groups, eased social inequalities and decreased levels of poverty from 60 to 35%.77 Furthermore, with Morales ‘for the first time since the Spanish Conquest […], Bolivia’s indigenous majority was led by one of their own’.78 Morales’s administration tried to put an end to centurieslong ‘distinctly Andean apartheid’79 by creating, for example, the Vice Ministry of Decolonization (2009), followed by a Unit of Depatriarchalization and a Law against Racism and Discrimination (2010); or by establishing by law that public sector workers should speak an Indigenous language. Rivera Cusicanqui—who has more recently been very critical of Morales’s administration—stated that Morales’s government had an immeasurable impact on [indigenous people’s] self-esteem. It recognizes the value of their own culture, of their roots, of their forms of dress, and it allows many people who previously were ashamed to be Indians to lift their heads. And for the many acculturated Indians called cholos who have denied their cultural origins, having an Indigenous president makes them turn around and recover their heritage.80

The ongoing socio-economic and political transformations in Bolivia at the time of the making of Zona sur are evoked explicitly in the film: Bernarda asks her mother: ‘What will happen to us, mum?’; she also discusses class and patriarchy with her university peers. Carola’s sister worries about the children’s future; Patricio’s plans to become a constitutional lawyer evoke Morales’s promulgation of a new constitution. The MAS administration is also the unspoken cause of the family’s economic decline, which is evident in Carola’s inability to pay her employee or even find the cash to pay for the shopping. However, the transformations brought about by the MAS are more explicitly represented through the

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character of Remedios. Carola’s lack of cash is countered by the suitcase of the wealthy Aymara Remedios who, dressed in a ‘luxurious pollera’ and accompanied by her lawyer and her assistant, offers 250,000 dollars in cash (to which she adds 20,000 more during the negotiations) to buy Carola’s house in the southern district. Carola initially refuses because of her emotional ties to a house in which she was raised, but ends up accepting the offer because she has no choice and, as Remedios states, because ‘the situation is tough’. The relationship of comadrazgo between Carola and Remedios is never explained; it seems to be a ‘literal’ one based on family history ties (cemented by spiritual kinship through baptism), but it could also be one of business camaraderie: in any case, it is a relationship informed by familiarity, discretion and trust. Maclean has offered a compelling analysis of Remedios character from the perspective of urban geography. The figure of Remedios, she maintains, represents the Aymara bourgeoisie that arose during Morales’s years and, specifically, the trope of the wealthy indigenous woman: the Chola paceña. Visually identified by the pollera skirt and the derby hat, the Chola paceña is a social type which became a visual symbol of the ‘decolonisation of the economy and the city [La Paz]’.81 After having emerged within the context of the Bolivian economic boom and the MAS’s decolonial approach, the Chola paceña would be declared part of the intangible cultural heritage of the country in 2013. This new middle sector is reshaping the paceño landscape in a context in which urban space expresses socio-economic and ethnic divisions. The zona sur is the warmer and most salubrious area of La Paz, a neighbourhood traditionally inhabited by affluent white and mestizo Bolivians. Because of this, as Maclain puts it, ‘To have someone wearing a pollera offering to purchase the house of a struggling Señora in the Zona Sur, is revolutionary’.82 In addition to representing the new Aymara bourgeoisie, the character of Remedios allows us to offer a more detailed elucidation of the notions of de/coloniality and legitimacy and also emphasize how the film engages with the aesthetics of politics. In order to demonstrate that, I shall examine what precedes the encounter between Carola and Remedios. The arrival of Remedios is anticipated by a significant dialogue, between Carola and Bernarda, on women, class and indigeneity. To Bernarda’s accusations that her mother is racist and/or classist, Carola replies:

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You must be sure of who you are. Have you taken a good look at our people? Have you seen how they are dressed? 500 years of oppression and no-one has managed to change what they wear. You surround yourself with people who enjoy seeing you ashamed of who you are. Do you know what the difference is between class and race? … That chola over there, is a proper chola, is a well-to-do woman with class. Erica is a birlocha. The family and the nation are in your blood. You are a native Bolivian, a jailona native.

A number of crucial issues relating to legitimacy, rootedness, place and nation, are touched on here. First, by claiming that her family is as legitimately native as Indigenous peoples because of its historical ties to the modern nation, Carola is vindicating her criollo lineage, tracing the origins of Bolivian nation to the arrival of the Spaniards in the sixteenth century and espousing the nationalist criollo ideology that informed the Bolivian state from the independence to the 1952 revolution. Second, she expresses admiration towards the Indigenous population and understands clothing as a marker of identity. She grants ‘legitimacy’ to Indigenous peoples because they have not changed their identity as symbolized by the fact that they have kept the way they dress intact since the colony and despite the Spanish exploitation. Carola’s understanding of indigenous cultural heritage is historically inaccurate since the ‘pollera’ is not actually native. The pollera (as well as the accompanying Manila shawl) is a local adaptation of Spanish garments: in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Indigenous clothing was attached to tributes and discrimination and was even forbidden after the Tupac Amaru II rebellion; therefore, Indigenous peoples in urban settings adopted the Spanish way of dressing in order to avoid such treatment; Spanish women, on the other hand, abandoned the pollera in an attempt to claim aristocratic lineage.83 However, despite its origins, the pollera has been associated with indigeneity and it is now claimed as a symbol of Andean ethnicity, which is what informs Carola’s discourse. In Carola’s eyes, Remedios’s cultural conservatism represents rootedness, strength and legitimacy; in contrast, Erica’s adoption of a Western image implies a denial of roots and therefore a loss of legitimacy. Carola’s view of Bolivian society resonates with the colonial order of the so-called ‘New World’ which, based on blood lineage, separated Indigenous and European groups in two coexisting but separate republics. This bicultural configuration continues to be expressed in the very emblem of the city of La Paz: on one side of the Choquepayu

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river lies the lion, on the other the lamb, living together in peace on the same territory, but separately. Finally, the dialogue and the scene of the economic transaction show that Carola regards Remedios as a member of a high bourgeoisie of sorts and hence, as someone with the same status as her. Their equal social status is emphasized by the film’s mise-en-scène; as Maclean argues, ‘[w]hen Remedios arrives, she is treated as kin. The two women address each other warmly, and the servant Marcelina serves both women in the same way, highlighting the class divisions in the room’84 ; moreover, they share the same ‘concern over their children’s relationships with partners who are socially inferior’.85 However, Remedios is not the descendent of a pre-Columbian nobility or high bourgeoisie, but rather a representative of a new Indigenous middle sector which embodies the social mobility so criticized by Carola as it represents a disruption of the status quo. The character of Remedios and her pollera underlined by Carola, is a way in which the film engages not only with some of the material and cultural changes brought about by Morales’s administration, but also with the symbolism of his government and the aesthetic of politics more generally. The pollera has become a symbol and sign of the transformation which has occurred since 2006. Banned until 1952, it became a ‘prominent political symbol in Bolivian discourse’86 which emphasized racial identity and ethnicity. Since the rise of Morales, there have been more women politicians confronting the oligarchy by wearing the pollera and speaking native languages. This reminds us that in political contexts, ‘symbolic discourse – manifested through images, rituals, speeches [and clothing] [is] a text that narrates […], that recounts history’.87 The political meaning of clothing has often been foregrounded in Latin America in different contexts. García Márquez famously received his 1982 Nobel Prize dressed in the Caribbean guayabera while politicians such as Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez and Rafael Correa have transformed their way of dressing into symbols. Evo Morales himself soon became famous for his ‘broad-striped woollen jumper’ and the alpaca jacket that replaced it, since both signified his rejection of the establishment and status quo.88 Hence, the film’s emphasis on the wealthy Andean woman might be read as a further reference to Bolivian contemporary politics. What is more, it serves as a reference to the power of aesthetics and the centrality of aesthetics in the construction of political projects. In November 2019, Morales insisted on running for the presidency despite the results of the referendum held in 2016, in which people

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voted against a fourth mandate. Morales won the elections, but fabricated accusations of electoral fraud led to mass street protests contesting the elections’ result, starting a period of violent social unrest and conflict between supporters and opponents of Morales. Morales eventually resigned, claiming that there had been a military coup and fled the country, first to Mexico, and subsequently to Argentina. The abrupt end of his fourteen-year rule left a vacuum that led to the interim presidency of Jeanine Áñez, a former television presenter representing the privileged white sectors opposed by Morales. Determined to undo her predecessor’s reforms, she ‘alienated the Indigenous population’, created an all-white cabinet (except for one Indigenous minister) and claimed to be returning ‘the bible to the palace’. Morales’s resignation ended ‘an incredible era in Bolivia’s history’.89 In January 2020, ahead of the elections, Áñez warned the electorate ‘not to allow “the savages to return to power”’ returning to the type of discrimination vehemently opposed by Morales. Eventually, the general elections held in October 2020 were won by the MAS, which returned to power with the presidency of Luis Arce, former minister of Economy and Public Finance under the administration of Evo Morales. Nevertheless, the temporary shift to a right-wing government and the resurgence of a racist political discourse shows how a film such as Zona sur is simultaneously anachronistic and urgent in present-day Bolivia. The shift in the balance of power in favour of subaltern agency which had been depicted in the film suddenly became a ghostly presence from the past, while the oppressive upper class habitus that had been utopically erased in the final scene where masters and servants all eat together at the same table, seemed to be returning in the off-screen reality with all its authoritative force.

Notes 1. Sergio de la Mora, ‘Roma: Repatriation vs Exploitation,’ Film Quarterly 72, No. 4 (2019), 1. 2. Eileen Boris and Rachel Salazar Parreñas, eds., Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care (Standford: Standford University Press, 2010). 3. Quoted in de la Mora ‘Roma,’ 5.

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4. Deborah Shaw, ‘Intimacy and Distance: Domestic Servants in Latin American Women’s Cinema: La mujer sin cabeza/The Headless Woman (Martel, 2008) and El niño pez/The Fish Child (Puenzo, 2009),’ in Latin American Women Filmmakers: Production, Politics, Poetics, eds. Deborah Martin and Deborah Shaw (I.B. Tauris, 2017). 5. Within months from its release, two special issues were published by Film Quarterly and Mediático, respectively. 6. Shaw, ‘Intimacy and Distance’. 7. Mónica Luján, ‘Juan Carlos Valdivia y el estreno de “Zona Sur”,’ Ibermedia Digital [online], August 16, 2009, available at https://ibermediadigital.com/ibermedia-television/entrev istas/juan-carlos-valdivia-y-el-estreno-de-zona-sur/. 8. Among the very few works on this film, it is worth mentioning Peter Baker, ‘An Infantile Witness in the New Bolivia: Juan Carlos Valdivia’s ‘Zona Sur,’ in The Feeling Child: Affect and Politics in Latin American Literature and Film, eds. Philippa Page, Inela Selimovic Camilla Sutherland (Minneapolis: Lexington Books, 2018) and Carolina Sitnisky, ‘Zona Sur: representación imaginaria de una nación paralizada,’ in Estado de las cosas: cine latinoamericano en el nuevo milenio, eds. Gabriela Copertari, Carolina Sitnisky (Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2015). 9. Kate Maclean, ‘Envisioning Gender, Indigeneity and Urban Change: The Case of La Paz, Bolivia,’ Gender, Place & Culture 25, No. 5 (2018), 711. 10. Household management and Servants of the Victorian Era (avicto rian.com). 11. Elizabeth Peredo Beltrán, Trabajadoras asalariadas del hogar en Bolivia (La Paz, Red de mujeres transformando la economía, 2015), 11. 12. Alberto Flores Galindo, Buscando un Inca: identidad y utopía en los Andes (Barcelona, Grijalbo, 1988). 13. Bonilla Silva 1996, quoted in Sarah Kollnig, ‘The “Good People” of Cochabamaba City: Ethnicity and Race in Bolivian Middle’Class Food Culture,’ Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies 15, No. 1 (2020), 25. 14. Barry Higman, ‘An Historical Perspective, Colonial Continuities in the Global Geography of Domestic Service,’ in Colonialisation and Domestic Service: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives,

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eds. Victoria Haskins and Claire Lowrie (London, New York: Routledge, 2015), 33. 15. Roberto Choque Canqui ‘La servidumbre indígena andina de Bolivia,’ in El siglo XIX: Bolivia y América latina (Lima: Institut français d’études andines, 1997) [online], March 9, 2020, available at http://books.openedition.org/ifea/7444. 16. Steven Shaviro ‘Affect vs. Emotion,’ The Cine-Files 10, 2016 [online], available at ‘The Cine-Files’ Affect Vs. Emotion. 17. Encarnación Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, ‘Migration, Domestic Work and Affect: a Decolonial Approach on Value and the Feminization of Labor,’ 5 [online], 2010, available at http://ebookcentral.pro quest.com. 18. Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, ‘Migration,’ 5. 19. Ann Laura Stoler, ed., Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 3. 20. Stoler, Haunted by Empire, 15. 21. Shireen Ally, ‘Domesti-City. Colonial Anxieties and Postcolonial Fantasies in the Figure of the Maid’, in Haskins and Lowrie, Colonialisation and Domestic Service. 22. Kollnig, ‘Ethnicity and Race,’ 28. 23. José María Arguedas, Los ríos profundos (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1958). 24. Deborah Martin, The Child in Contemporary Latin American Cinema (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 7. 25. Liliana Colanzi, ‘[i]Zona Sur[/i] – una película sobre la Bolivia en transición,’ Americas Quarterly [online], February 25, 2010, available at https://www.americasquarterly.org/blog/izona-sur-iuna-pelicula-sobre-la-bolivia-en-transicion/. 26. Rachel Randall, Children on the Threshold in Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Nature, Gender, and Agency (Blue Ridge Summit: The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, 2017), XXV. See also Claudia Castañeda, Figurations: Child, Bodies, Worlds (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 21. 27. Castañeda, Figurations, 1. 28. Emma Wilson, ‘Children, Emotion and Viewing in Contemporary European Film,’ Screen 46, No. 3 (Autumn 2005), 329–340. 29. Martin, The Child, 6.

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30. Karina Elizabeth Vázquez, ‘Leftovers No More: Affect, Food, and Power in Recent Latin American Films on Domestic Work,’ in Domestic Labor in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema, eds. Elizabeth Osborne and Sofía Ruiz-Alfaro (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 78. 31. Kollnig, ‘Ethnicity and Race’. 32. ‘Ají de fideos uchu (Picante de fideos en quechua),’ Calendario de Sabores y Tradiciones de Bolivia [online], available at https://cal endariosaboresbolivia-blog.tumblr.com/post/18817721772/ajide-fideos-o-fideos-uchu-picante-de-fideos-en; http://www.gente. com.bo/local/20190512/fideos-uchu-un-plato-emblematico-debolivia. 33. A few years ago, the paceño Asociación de Conjuntos Folklóricos del Gran Poder established the 6th of January as Ají de Fideo day. 34. Clare A. Sammells, ‘Reimagining Bolivian Cuisine: Haute traditional Food and Its Discontents,’ Food and Foodways 27, No. 4 (2019), 340. 35. Sammells, ‘Reimagining,’ 340. 36. Shakow 2014, quoted in Sammells, ‘Reimagining,’ 347. 37. Sammells, ‘Reimagining,’ 347. 38. Sammells, ‘Reimagining,’ 340. 39. Cristina Olmos ‘Ají de Fideos o Fideos Uchu (Picante de Fideos en Quechua),’ Sabores de Bolivia [online], available at https://calendariosaboresbolivia.com/2016/01/06/aji-de-fid eos-o-fideos-uchu-picante-de-fideos-en/. 40. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction (London and New York: Routledge), 6. 41. Bourdieu, Distinction, 101. 42. Kollnig, ‘Ethnicity and Race,’ 40. 43. Quoted in Kollnig, ‘Ethnicity and Race,’ 32. 44. Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 6– 7. 45. Sommer, Foundational Fictions, 6. 46. Sommer, Foundational Fictions, 22. 47. Deborah Martin, The cinema of Lucrecia Martel (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 15.

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48. Stephen Buttes, ‘Huaso Romance as Neoliberal Reform in Sebastián Silva’s La nana’, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 23, No. 4 (2014), 352. 49. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge: 1991), 44. 50. Patricia de Santana Pinho, ‘The Dirty Body That Cleans: Representations of Domestic Workers in Brazilian Common Sense,’ Meridians 13, No. 1 (2015), 121. 51. De Santana Pinho, ‘The Dirty Body.’ 52. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and NY: Routledge, 1994), 122. 53. Bhabha, Location, 122. 54. Luce Irigaray, The Sex Which Is Not One (New York: Cornell University Press 1985), 76. 55. Judith Butler and Regina Michalik, ‘The Desire for Philosophy. Interview with Judith Butler,’ in Lola Press [online], May 2001, available at http://criticaltheorylibrary.blogspot.com/2011/05/ judith-butler-desire-for-philosophy.html. 56. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia the Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 1. 57. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 1. 58. Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in PostColoniality (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 5. 59. Ahmed, Strange Encounters, 50. 60. Ahmed, Strange Encounters, 15. 61. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 3. 62. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 3. 63. Martin, The Cinema of Lucrecia Martel, 15. 64. Luis Vélez-Serrano, ‘Zona Sur (Juan Carlos Valdivia, Bolivia 2010), PuntoLatino.ch [online], available at https://www.puntol atino.ch/cultura/item/cine-notas-zona-sur-nota-de-luis-velez-ser rano.html. 65. Maclean, ‘Envisioning gender,’ 13. 66. Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Violencias (re) encubiertas en Bolivia (La paz: Piedra rota, 2010). 67. Cusicanqui, Violencias. 68. Bruce Isaacs, ‘Reality Effects: The Ideology of the Long Take in the Cinema of Alfonso Cuarón,’ in Post-Cinema: Theorizing

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21st-Century Film, eds. Shane Denson and Julia Leyda (Falmer: REFRAME Books, 2016) [online], January 22, 2021, 475, available at https://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/post-cinema/4-3-isaacs/. 69. Ricardo Bajo, ‘Sobre un coloquio con el cineasta Juan Carlos Valdivia. Charlando sobre Zona Sur,’ Ibermedia Digital [online], September 27, 2009, available at http://ibermediadigital.com/ ibermedia-television/entrevistas/sobre-un-coloquio-con-el-cin easta-juan-carlos-valdivia-charlando-sobre-zona-sur/; https://ibe rmediadigital.com/ibermedia-television/entrevistas/juan-carlosvaldivia-y-el-estreno-de-zona-sur/. 70. Isaacs, ‘Reality Effects,’ 488. 71. Hannes Bergthaller, ‘Living in Bubbles: Peter Sloterdijk’s Spherology and the Environmental Humanities’, 3. 72. Noel Parker and Nick Vaughan-Williams, ‘Critical Border Studies: Broadening and Deepening the ‘Lines in the Sand’ Agenda,’ Geopolitics 17, No. 4 (2012), 727. 73. Parker, Vaughan-Williams, ‘Critical Border,’ 727. 74. Parker, Vaughan-Williams, ‘Critical Border,’ 727. 75. Linda C. Farthing and Benjamin H. Kohl, Evo’s Bolivia: Continuity and Change (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014), 3. 76. Farthing, Kohl, Evo’s Bolivia, 5. 77. His nationalization of hydrocarbon industries and decolonial approach, as well as the contingent boom in natural resources, allowed an economic growth that tripled the GPD and facilitated the emergence of new Indigenous middle sectors. Farthing, Kohl, Evo’s Bolivia. 78. Farthing, Kohl, Evo’s Bolivia, 1. 79. Farthing, Kohl, Evo’s Bolivia, 1. 80. Linda Farthing, ‘Everything Is Up for Discussion: A 40th Anniversary Conversation With Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui,’ NACLA Report on the Americas 40, No. 4 (January, 2007), available at http://dx. doi.org/10.1080/10714839.2007.11722298. 81. Maclean, ‘Envisioning gender,’ 17. 82. Maclean, ‘Envisioning gender,’ 19. 83. Cusicanqui, Violencias, 194. 84. Maclean, ‘Envisioning gender,’ 15. 85. Maclean, ‘Envisioning gender,’ 14. 86. Maclean, ‘Envisioning gender,’ 18.

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87. Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press 2000), 2. 88. See Maclean, ‘Evo’s Jumper: Identity and the Used Clothes Trade in “Post-Neoliberal” and “Pluri-Cultural” Bolivia,’ Gender, Place & Culture 21, No. 8 (2014). 89. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/democraciaabierta/evomorales-la-caída-del-héroe-de-la-transformación-boliviana-en/.

CHAPTER 6

Necropolitics, Activism and Pedagogy: Terra vermelha (2008)

Terra vermelha [Red land] (2008), known also as La terra degli uomini rossi [The land of the red men] and Birdwatchers , is a Brazilian-Italian coproduction by Chile-born Argentinean-Italian filmmaker Marco Bechis.1 It is a film that fictionalizes the real struggles of the Guaraní-Kaiowá people in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul by telling the story of a retomada [retaking] of ancestral land carried out by a group of Indigenous people and of their conflict with the local fazendeiro [ranch owner]. Most of the cast are non-professional Guaraní-Kaiowá actors (many of whom were from the Guyra Roka community) who speak Guarani as well as Portuguese on screen and reproduce the off-screen violence they face on a daily basis. When Terra vermelha premiered at the 2008 Venice film festival, Indigenous actress Eliane Juca da Silva (who plays the role of Mami) gave a powerful emotional speech in Guarani at the opening press conference for the film. In the speech, she addressed issues we have encountered in the previous chapters: Indigenous discrimination and human rights abuses, the relationship between Western and non-Western populations, land dispossession and deforestation and the visibilization of Indigenous stories offered by film festivals: I would have never hoped to have this opportunity. Marco Bechis has lived with us for years documenting how our life is today. Today I feel so sad because our leaders are killed and many children die due to malnutrition. Today we no longer have rivers, or water. What we ask for are opportunities © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. C. D’Argenio, Indigenous Plots in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93914-4_6

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for our youth, Indigenous individuals who are just like you. We too are humans, we are not only ‘Indios’. We too have thoughts, a culture, a language. You have taught us to be like you. Our people today do what you do, we dress like you, we eat like you. Why? Because today our land, our tekoha which was a flourishing forest has been completely destroyed.2

Compared with the films analysed so far, however, Juca da Silva’s words and, indeed, Bechis’s film, seek to both raise the public’s awareness and to more loudly denounce the conflicts confronting Indigenous populations within the context of the ecocide taking place in their region today. Their aim, then, is to produce a real change beyond the realm of the symbolic. In what follows, I argue that Terra vermelha is an example of cinematic pedagogical activism that interrogates Western imaginaries of indigeneity, informs the public as well as denouncing the necropolitics which threatens Guaraní-Kaiowá life, and enacts a type of activism informed by an empathetic and political alliance with the Indigenous actors. In that sense, the film dovetails with the Latin American traditions of nuevo cine latinoamericanoand the more recent video indígena. I would also suggest that Juca da Silva’s speech allows an understanding of film festivals as ephemeral platforms of political agency. Following the holistic approach taken so far, I hence locate Terra vermelha in a broader set of film traditions as well as within Bechis’s own personal and professional trajectory; unlike in the case of the previous films, however, such an approach leads me to consider Terra vermelha as part, not only of the recent trend I am mapping in this book, but of a broader circuit of films traditions and socio-political processes.

Indigeneity and the Western Gaze As in El abrazo de la serpiente, Terra vermelha opens with an embodied immersion in the selva through natural sounds while the opening credits appear on a black screen. As the film’s title becomes visible, the viewer is introduced to the image of the Amazon via a bird’s eye shot of a forest crossed by a river, which renders the common Western trope of tropical infinity; this position of visual privilege is eventually replaced by the view at river level, where a boat engine disrupts the jungle’s soundscape. In a similar manner, once again, to El abrazo de la serpiente, the film starts with an encounter between Westerners and Indigenous people. On a small boat, a trio of white tourists indulge in birdwatching, guided by

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a white woman named Beatrice (played by Italian actress Chiara Caselli), and a white man named Roberto (played by Italian actor Claudio Santamaria). While they slowly navigate the river, they turn their gaze to see a group of Indigenous individuals who suddenly appear on the opposite shore: wearing tribal costumes, half naked with their faces painted red, the Indigenous subjects stand in the river and in the bushes while the handheld camera pans across each one of them. The film thus displays another conventional Western trope with this visualization of the ‘uncontacted tribe’: apparently disturbed by the presence of the tourists, the natives shout and hurl arrows towards the boat. However, the film hints at more complex relationships between the two groups by means of an exchange of gazes between the white woman on the boat and the Indigenous women on the shore. The camerawork keeps hinting at more complicated meanings throughout the sequence by alternating between the two groups in order to represent the perspectives of both the native inhabitants and the foreigners. At this point, we abandon the tourists and follow the group of the Guaraní-Kaiowá as they leave the forest. The baroque music of seventeenth-century Jesuit composer Domenico Zipoli, who taught music among the Guaraní people in what is now Paraguay, replaces the sounds of nature. Once out of the forest, the appeal to a conventional Western imaginary witnessed so far is undermined by the realization that the previous scene had been a mere performance of Indigenous authenticity for the Western eye. In effect, Bechis employs an aesthetics of counterpoint to craft and then shatter Western dominant imaginaries of indigeneity. We find out that the Indigenous group is paid by Beatrice to ‘play’ native characters for her tourism business. Lia (played by the Guaraní-Kaiowá Alicélia Batista Cabreira), one of the main Indigenous characters of the film, receives money for the performance from Beatrice’s maid (who is also Guaraní-Kaiowá and speaks to her in Guarani), after which the whole group get on the jeep waiting for them, and get changed into their usual Western clothes. As the vehicle leaves, a different mise-en-scène fills the frame: the forest gives way to a vast area of cultivated lands. It is the landscape typical of the Mato Grosso do Sul region, where a harsh deforestation has been carried out in order to allow for the cultivation of the soybean, sugarcane and other crops by the local export-oriented agribusiness. The mise-en-scène and photography reveal the film’s ideological grounding: the privileging of the deforested area emphasizes the destruction of the Amazon and Cerrado habitats—which, we discover, is threatening the

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life of the Indigenous population—while the predominance of matt and desaturated colours evokes the idea of a desolated territory as opposed to the paradisiacal image of the green Amazon. Through such landscape, the camera takes us from the initial fictional performance of indigeneity to the filmic recreation of the real world of a Guaraní-Kaiowá reserve. If the initial scene aims to expose and dismantle the Western tropes of Indigenous authenticity and of ‘uncontacted tribes’, the following scenes take issues with the binary modernity/tradition, which has often been used to conceptualize indigeneity as bound to tradition and past, as already discussed in the previous chapters. Opposing such tendencies, Terra vermelha shows how entangled what we call ‘modernity’ and what we call ‘tradition’ are in the case of the Guaraní-Kaiowá. Indeed, modernity and tradition (as understood, it should be noted, from a Western perspective) are shown as intertwined: a girl performs what seems to be a native dance in a traditional Oga Pysy ceremonial house while we hear Brazilian electro house dance music (it is the song ‘Nas ondas do rádio’ by well-known singer and electro-house-dance music producer Mister Sidy); the Indigenous youngsters have mobile phones; the characters wear Western clothes but speak their Indigenous languages and practice traditional forms of spirituality. Most notably, the latter are evoked early in the film through the nightmares of the young shamanto-be Osvaldo (Guaraní-Kaiowá Pedro Abrísio da Silva-Chirivy Poty’i), who is haunted by the Angué spirit. The film, though, goes beyond any deconstruction of the conventional positioning of modernity and tradition by instead suggesting a reading of the binary within the context of capitalist expansion, state intervention and, as I will explain next, ‘necropolitcs’. These three processes linked to Western modernity are presented as threats to Indigenous life: Osvaldo and Irineu (GuaraníKaiowá Ademilson Concianza Verga), for example, are not able to find food in the traditional Guaraní-Kaiowá way (i.e. hunting) because there are no animals left in the forest; the Guaraní-Kaiowá community is plagued with high rates of suicide among its youngsters (the film starts and ends with an episode of suicide) because of the difficult living conditions within the Indigenous reserves; the Indigenous peoples are threatened by the ranch owners’ gun men as soon as they get near their territories. The overarching issue posited by the film, therefore, is not one of transformation versus preservation or present versus past, but simply one of Indigenous survival.

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Necropolitics and Ecocide Early in the film, Osvaldo and Irineu find the corpses of two female teenagers from their community who have hung themselves. This episode is presented as a tragic common reality within the community and leads the leader Nádio (the late Guaraní-Kaiowá activist Ambrósio VilhalvaKunumi Taperendi) and the local shaman or Nhanderu (played by the Guaraní-Kaiowá Nelson Concianza) to make the decision to carry out a retomada, that is, to take back their takoha, the land of their ancestors. As actor Ambrósio Vilhalva explained in an interview, ‘a retomada means that that we are going to retake possession of our takoha. No one decides because we are all equals. Our Nhanderu prays for one, two weeks and then he gives us an answer, yes or no [in relation to the retomada]’. In the film, the community’s tekoha is currently part of the lands owned by the ranch owner Moreira (played by the Brazilian actor Leonardo Medeiros), who works in the agribusiness and owns most of the territory; Moreira lives with his teenage daughter Maria (played by the young Brazilian actress Fabiane Pereira da Silva) and Beatrice in their wealthy fazenda. Nádio and a small group of fellow Guaraní-Kaiowá set an encampment on the road, on the border of Moreira’s land, and start living there in extreme precarious conditions. From then on, the film follows, on the one hand, the group’s everyday life and practices of survival and, on the other, their clash with the ranch owner, which will eventually culminate in Nádio’s murder. The film’s plot and mise-en-scène engage with two processes that shape the real present-day situation of the Guaraní-Kaiowá population: land expropriation and high suicide rates, which are strategy and consequence, respectively, of the necropolitics of the local political and economic powers. Necropolitics is a concept coined by Achille Mbembe to address the place given to life, death and the human body within the order of power when politics becomes a form of war. Expanding on Michel Foucault’s notion of biopower (that is, the power to decide who can live and who must die), Mbembe utilizes the notion of necropolitics or necropower to explain how sovereignty can not only exert control over an individual´s life or death, but can also take ‘as its primary and absolute objective the enemy’s murder’ under the ‘guise of war, resistance or the war on terror’.3 In his words, necropolitics refers to:

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the various ways in which, in our contemporary world, weapons are deployed in the interest of maximally destroying persons and creating death-worlds, that is, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead 4

The Guaraní-Kaiowá—one of the four existing Guaraní groups and the largest Indigenous population living in Brazil—are approximately 45,000 people living mostly in Mato Grosso do Sul. As is well known, the process of land expropriation of the Indigenous populations in what is today Latin America started with the European colonization. The sixteenth-century principle of international law known as the ‘Doctrine of Discovery’ allowed colonizers to claim overseas territories and, hence, ownership of the lands of Indigenous peoples without their consent. Since colonial times, attempts were made to safeguard Indigenous rights in Brazil but the laws were rarely enforced. As early as the seventeenth century, the indigenato (instituted in 1680 by the King of Portugal) ‘guaranteed that the concession of land to private individuals should not interfere with the “original rights” of the Indigenous groups to their land, as well as exempting them from any duty or tribute’.5 Later, in 1823, José Bonifacio de Andrada e Silva, a central figure in Brazil’s first constitutional convention, wrote a document in which he defined the native populations as ‘the truly ancient lords of the land’. However, legislation was easily bypassed and land could be obtained by the state. After 1880, for example, a large amount of Guaraní-Kaiowá land went to the corporation Matte Larangeira Company, which cultivated the native mate herb and exploited the local population. Twentieth-century constitutions have protected as well as limited Indigenous rights to the lands they inhabited by establishing that Indigenous people need to live in the lands permanently and cannot ‘alienate’ them. The current 1988 constitution states that the Indigenous land belongs to the Federal Union, but Indigenous communities have permanent possession of those lands and the right to the exclusive use of surface resource.6 The constitution also states that any exploration within the Indigenous land needs to be approved by the National Congress, and that Indigenous communities must be involved in the process. While Indigenous populations can safeguard their lands by requesting to have them demarcated legally, this process is complicated by bureaucracy: the lands ‘must fit limited characteristics as defined in the constitution and

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must be traditionally occupied and used by Indians on a permanent basis, necessary for the preservation of environmental resources and native wellbeing’.7 For Mbembe, the colony is the site ‘par excellence where controls and guarantees of judicial order can be suspended —the zone where the violence of the state of exception is deemed to operate in the service of “civilization”’.8 Within the process of colonization, ‘in the conqueror’s eyes, savage life is just another form of animal life, a horrifying experience, something alien beyond imagination or comprehension’.9 As for the present, according to Mbembe, the ‘most accomplished form of necropower’ is the occupation of Palestinian territories. As I write this chapter in May 2021, in the middle of the Israeli government’s attempt to control the Palestinian population of Gaza through bombardment, Mbembe’s statement resonates quite tragically. However, drawing on current studies of the Guaraní-Kaiowá’s situation, I would suggest that that the process of land dispossession and killings of Indigenous communities occurring in the Mato Grosso do Sul documented in Terra vermelha can be understood as a further example of contemporary necropolitics since it is a case of a local sovereignty concerned with the material destruction of human bodies and populations, and which is also informed by a politics of race intertwined with a politics of death. Indeed, in addition to the perennial lack of enforcement of existing legislation outlined above, the main threat to Indigenous lands since the 1990s has been posed by the agribusiness-based economy, supported by a coalition of landowners, conservative politicians, banks, industry and transnational corporations. This situation, as Antonio Ioris points out, has resulted in the harassment of Indigenous groups by police and fazendeiros ’ private gunmen (silently tolerated by the justice system), who regularly kill them and do not allow them to return to their ancestral lands, as well as poor living conditions in both the often overcrowded reserves and the encampments of the retomadas .10 Ioris explains that these processes started in the early decades of the twentieth century, when the fertile red soils of Matto Grosso do Sul were colonized by migrants’ large farms incentivized by legislation promoting ‘the privatisation of ecosystems, deforestation and monoculture-based agribusiness’.11 Consequently, contemporary scholars argue that the Guaraní-Kaiowá populations are being subjected to genocidal practices of ‘cultural destruction, social death and ecological devastation (ecocide)’12 ; in other words, the genocidal practices alluded to in Juca da Silva’s declaration at the film’s premiere which was quoted above.

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Bechis himself talks of the Guaraní-Kaiowá situation along these lines when he states that he sees them as the survivors of a genocide initiated with the Conquest and as a people currently threatened again by the ongoing ecocide.13 The filmmaker sees such an institutionalized politics of death as a process that has shaped Latin American history not only in relation to the Indigenous populations but also the whole citizenship in specific historical moments such as the military dictatorships of the 1970s, a reality he witnessed in first person. In 1977, he was arrested within the context of the infamous Proceso de Reorganización Nacional campaign [Process of National Reorganization] in Argentina. As is wellknown, between 1976 and 1983, the authoritarian military Junta violently repressed any form of dissent, by arresting, killing, torturing and disappearing thousands of alleged left-wing political opponents. It is estimated that 30,000 citizens were killed. Many of them (both opponents to the government and innocent people) were disappeared after being tortured in clandestine detention camps. Bechis himself was arrested and tortured in the detention camp known as Club Atlético. Thanks to the intervention of his father’s contacts (Bechis Senior was a manager at Fiat) and his Italian passport, he was transferred to a regular jail after being detained at the camp for two weeks. On his later release from jail, he was put on a flight to Italy where he has lived ever since. Bechis’s interpretation of the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional campaign as the ‘idea of physically eliminating the “other”’ can be understood as a further example of necropolitics, which has been the subject of several of his works. In 1982, he addressed the trauma of the disappeared through his Milan installation Desaparecidos, dove sono? [Disappeared, where are they?]. In 1999 and 2001, respectively, he made the films Garaje Olimpo, on the atrocious realities of the dictatorship’s detention camps, and Figli/Hijos, on the children born to pregnant mothers held in captivity and illegally adopted after their mothers were executed once they had delivered their babies. More recently, in 2015, he went back to this theme with his documentary Il rumore della memoria [The noise of memory], on the life of Vera Vigevani Jarach, an Italian Jew, and one of the founders of the human rights association Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo [the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo] who experienced both the Nazi regime and the Argentine dictatorship; and his book La solitudine del sovversivo [The solitude of the subversive] (2021), which explores his experience as a survivor.

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The filmmaker has suggested that the origins of a similar politics of death are to be found in the Indigenous genocide initiated with the Conquest and carried out again in Argentina during the so-called Conquest of the Desert campaign (1870s–1880s). According to him, both the native Indigenous populations and the political opponents were exterminated because they were considered beyond redemption and corrupted.14 Such a perspective as well as his previous work are crucial for understanding the way he approaches indigeneity in Terra vermelha. His political commitment within and beyond the artistic realm, his experience of the military dictatorship and his condition as a survivor help explain his interest in, and support for the Guaraní-Kaiowá cause and how this was shaped in the film. Therefore, despite focusing on Indigenous populations living in Brazil, Terra vermelha should be seen as a continuation of, rather than a departure from the filmmaker’s previous work, not least of all because this is a reading suggested by Bechis himself: My main motivation was the awareness that perhaps the greatest genocide in history was the extermination of Indigenous populations in the fifteenth century, with the arrival of the conquistadores. Then, between the end of the 1800s and the beginning of 1900s, the Indigenous populations who lived in the pampas of Patagonia were massacred by the military. Thinking of this history, I suddenly made a connection with the recent Argentine dictatorship.15

Such continuity can be established not only in terms of themes (necropolitics) but also in terms of political activism through cinema, a notion that informs all of Bechis’s works. More specifically, the political in cinema is ‘the way of making films’ since, as he explains, ‘[i]t is necessary to be political in every moment and with every aspect of the film’s production, trying to find the most revolutionary ways of making a film, even if it’s a commercial film’.16 Bechis’s political cinema draws on the experience of real survivors. If for Garaje Olimpo, Bechis drew on real testimonies of survivors, in Terra vermelha the filmmaker has worked with the Indigenous actors who, according to Bechis’ own declarations, have been advisors and ‘co-authors’ of the film’s script, as I will explain in more detail in the following pages. Unlike most of the films analysed here, the political dimension of Bechis’s work is similar to that of the nuevo cine latinoamericano, even if his own cinematic corpus is not informed by the same Marxist agenda nor does it employ the same aesthetic registers. Yet,

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his work does seem to draw on a similar sense of ‘urgency’ as the nuevo cine latinoamericano by seeking to inspire greater public awareness of the victims of political and economic power and to provoke real social change. In the case of Terra vermelha, this is made apparent by the film’s narrative, the above-mentioned interventions at the Venice film festival and the paratextual information that appears on the screen after the film ends, namely: When the European arrived in 1500 in Brazil, there were five million Indians. Five centuries of massacres and illnesses have annihilated a large part of the Indigenous population and hundreds of tribes have been exterminated. Today the genocide continues. The Guaraní-Kaiowá of Mato Grosso do Sul are fighting to survive and take back their land and their life. Help them. Make a donation or support them in other ways. Visit www.guarani-survival.org

These words recall those I have discussed in relation to El abrazo de la serpiente. However, unlike in Guerra’s film, here the focus is on the fight of a specific Indigenous population and on taking concrete action to support them, as demonstrated by the invitation to make a donation or support them in other ways. The film is also close to Indigenous filmmaking or Fourth cinema, as I shall explain, for it is ‘embedded in values of reciprocity and participation’ and strives to offer ‘an “internal” perspective that may empower and provide counter-histories for Native peoples’.17 Hence, despite being a mainstream film by a non-Indigenous filmmaker, its making is informed by an affective and militant alliance between the Indigenous cast and the filmmaker.

Film as Sites of Learning The film’s mise-en-scène functions pedagogically, creating awareness in the Western audience by instructing them about the situation of the Guaraní-Kaiowá people (the complex life in the reserve, the suicides and the dispossession of their lands) and fictionalizing their struggles to retake their tekoha. Terra vermelha’s pedagogical engagement with indigeneity is articulated through the notion of the every day since, throughout the film, we follow the Indigenous group as they carry out their daily activities: their attempts to hunt animals in the forest, their going to the local shop, preparing food, performing collective prayers and rituals, or

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working for the fazendeiros. We also see the displays of the negation of human dignity to which they are subjected through daily discrimination: in the shop there is a sign that reads ‘no alcohol to Indians’, Moreira demands that the groups must stay confined to their reserve, gunmen try to shoot them and the conditions of those working on the ranches are virtually inhumane. On the other hand, and bearing in mind Sarah Shamash’s argument in relation to Amazonian films, I would suggest that in Terra vermelha the representation of the everyday ‘shows displays of cultural activity’18 : we watch Indigenous rituals in both the reserve and the encampment; we see the Nhanderu teaching Osvaldo about shamanism; we learn about the small community’s collective practices relating to food and hunting as well as values that privilege communality over individualism. Moreover, the film’s focus on Indigenous practices of subsistence (hunting, fishing) becomes a way to ‘resist patriarchal, capitalist modernity by visualizing age-old and ever adapting Indigenous epistemes that propose ecoautonomous non-market paradigms of community and wellbeing’.19 However, in the film the every day seems to be ‘re-politicised’ not (only) because of its opposition to capitalism but because it shows how capitalist expansion threatens the life of Indigenous people. All of the above cultural activities are disrupted, interrupted, frustrated, thus, creating a situation in which the very survival of the community is put in danger. It is also relevant, therefore, that the film focuses less on ‘communal reproduction’, that is, non-capitalist quotidian forms of labour, and more on how capitalism is specifically affecting Guaraní-Kaiowá survival. The key issue at the core of the latter process is the Indigenous land. Starting from the title of the Brazilian and Italian versions of the film, the land is presented as the film’s central axis. The Italian title La terra degli uomini rossi foregrounds the theme of belonging while explicitly addressing the non-Indigenous and non-Brazilian audience. As Aline Frey states, ‘created for European audiences, the Italian title used a familiar colonial trope of the supposed “red” skin of Indigenous peoples (in contrast to the “white” skin of Europeans, black of Africans and yellow of Asians)’.20 While the notion of skin colour might be certainly seen as problematic for it evokes the pigmentocracy entangled with the racial politics of colonialism, Fray explains that there are studies claiming that the trope of ‘red skin’ ‘originated from a specific group of Indigenous peoples who coined it as a way to differentiate themselves from European settlers’21 ; therefore, ‘contrary to Eurocentric narratives, Indigenous

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peoples were the agents of their own identification, rather than victims of colonial discourse’.22 The Portuguese title, instead, contextualizes the story within Brazil’s southern regions where land is known for its red colour. Finally, the English title, Birdwatchers , foreground the issue of (Western) gazing, which, as we have seen, is an important concern in the story. The English title also relates to the notion of extractivism. Indeed, the touristic practice of birdwatching is presented as part of a broader set of practices which exploit the Indigenous land at the service of individual capitalist gain; nevertheless, it is land extractivism rather than tourism’s cultural extractivism that the film highlights. The film articulates a binary understanding of the notion of land, which speaks to broader epistemic differences between Indigenous and settler groups. Whereas Moreira sees the land as a resource ripe for extraction within capitalist logic, Nádio vindicates a relationship that does not separate nature from culture, human from non-human. This is most clearly exemplified in one of the few scenes in which Moreira actually confronts the Guaraní-Kaiowá community. The scene takes place after the retomada and starts with a medium close-up of a white Brazilian attorney, who employs the language and technology of law to address the ongoing conflict. While the matter is being discussed in Brasilia (where the state judiciary institutions are based), he states that ‘respecting the borders’ is the solution proposed. The attorney warns Nádio not to let his people enter Moreira’s lands and residences. Moreira, on the other hand, will commit to keeping his people away from the occupied area (he had placed Roberto living there in a caravan). Ironically, the attorney concludes with the following warning: ‘I don’t want justice violated, okay?’. This is indeed a pivotal scene which allows an examination of the film’s representation of indigeneity in relation to both culture and capitalism. Regarding the former, the camerawork and the mise-en-scène construe an opposition between, on the one hand, Indigenous communality and, on the other hand, white individualism. For instance, the attorney and Moreira are framed either on their own, or together while maintaining a certain distance, whereas when the camera switches to Nádio, the whole small community occupies the frame with their bodies closely touching; they are hence presented as a collective that wishes to oppose both formal (the attorney) and informal (Moreira) authority. Furthermore, the dialogue foregrounds the difference between the two groups in relation to technology. As was the case with Ixcanul , here the encounter with ‘white’

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technology is linked to power. The attorney’s words evoke the technopolitics of print and law which we saw at play in Bustamante’s film; even so, in Terra vermelha the Indigenous group is not portrayed as a victim due to their illiteracy and unfamiliarity with the authority of paper; they vindicate their non-Western epistemology. ‘We do not need papers’, claims Nádio eloquently, ‘I don’t understand them and I don’t even care. We are here. The land is ours. We no longer have the forest, we no longer have anything to survive. We’re [here] and we’re staying here’. The epistemic difference between the Indigenous and the nonIndigenous people is articulated even more clearly in the subsequent exchange. Grabbing a handful of soil, Moreira justifies his attachment to the land by invoking family bonds and genealogy: ‘this land, my father arrived here more than sixty years ago, that’s three generations, I was born here. My daughter grew up here, I work this land from dawn to dusk so that it gives fruit. I sow nourishment so people can eat’. Interestingly, these words correspond quite literally to the narratives defended by real fazendeiros who justify their entitlement to the land in terms of not only property rights but also family belonging. Significantly, while the speech expresses Moreira’s perspective, the camera reveals the ideological hierarchies informing the film through the evocative framing of Nádio and the other protagonists looking at the fazendeiro. Once Moreira finishes his speech, Nádio carries out a highly symbolic gesture: he also grabs a handful of soil but, unlike Moreira, he eats it (Fig. 6.1).

Fig. 6.1 Nádio eating soil in a pivotal scene of Terra vermelha. Still from the film

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Nádio’s gesture, which imitates the real gesture of late activist Marcos Veron, points to two different notions of land. Reading this scene in terms of extractivism, we might say that, via Nádio’s gesture and the camera work described above, the film contests Moreira’s ‘extractive view’ which ‘sees territories as commodities, rendering land as for the taking, while also devalorizing the hidden worlds that form the nexus of human and nonhuman multiplicity’.23 As Macarena Gómez-Barris observes, the extractive view, like the colonial gaze, ‘facilitates the reorganization of territories, populations, and plant and animal life into extractible data and natural resources for material and immaterial accumulation’.24 The film’s mise-en-scène translates the consequences of real extractivist processes on the Brazilian landscape through the depiction of a ‘sterile’, ‘arid’ and ‘monotonous’ scenery as well as through the absence of wild animals— the only animals we see are Moreira’s; as Frey states, ‘the once luxurious and bio-diverse Indigenous traditional lands are reduced to a desert occupied by herds of grass-fed cows’.25 In opposition to the extractive view, Terra vermelha foregrounds subalternized perspectives ‘that perceive local terrain as sources of knowledge, vitality and livability’.26 Indeed, Guaraní-Kaiowá’s notion of land is highly spiritual: Kaiowa existence is particularly characterised by a scalar and deeply religious conception of space, from the household to the network of settlements and Indigenous reserves. Following the Kaiowa cosmovision, people do not own or trade the land, but live there, sharing it with other creatures and constantly having to negotiate their conditions; these creatures hold or belong to the spirits [jaras], whose categorisation depends on the relations established between humans and nonhumans.27

Such a conception is displayed in the film through the notion of the tekoha. The tekoha ‘has no rigid limits, but comprises the space needed to hunt and fish’, is ‘broadly delimited by hills and rivers, and often includes a river basin’ and is ‘the specific area where one or a few extended families live, strongly connected with other tekohas through regular meetings, marriages and ceremonies’.28 The tekoha is also linked to kinship and the production of culture rather than to economy, something that Vilhalva confirms when he states that the retomada of the tekoha ‘will reinforce our way of being Kaiowa’.

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It is not surprising that the mise-en-scène of Terra vermelha is filled with borders: in the opening sequence, the river separates the tourists from the Indigenous group situated on the shore; later, Osvaldo and Irineu cross the border of Moreira’s property to hunt; the shop is filled with restrictions for ‘Indians’; the plaque of the reserve demarcates the place of the Indigenous population; the encampment is organized near the wire that demarcates Moreira’s land and at the side of a road; the main theme of the retomada is explicitly about de/re-constructing borders. The acts of territorialization, either represented or evoked in the film, can be understood through the concept of ‘frontier-making’—a notion used by Ioris, instead of that of land dispossession or grabbing, to explain the situation of the real Guaraní-Kaiowá groups in relation to their land, which is characterized by being ‘without space’. As Ioris explains: ‘[T]he process of frontier making’ […] ‘was a devastating blow that went far beyond only land or resource grabbing: it has been a true phenomenon of world-grabbing in the sense that it has been an attempt to reduce lives and landscapes to the language of money and profit’ (Fig. 6.2).29 He goes even further by stating that frontier-making has transformed Indigenous subjects into ‘squatters’, that is people who can be removed from disputed areas in order for private property and wage labour to flourish.30 This is paradoxical and problematic for while the ‘squatter is product of the very logic of the expansion of capital; the Indian is not’.31 The relationship between Indigenous groups and land does not respond to the logic of capitalism because they do not see land as a commodity,

Fig. 6.2 The protagonists of Terra vermelha in a ritual in front of their tekoha in a still from the film

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it is ‘sacred’. The notion of frontier-making also encompasses not only land dispossession but also Guaraní-Kaiowá resistance and self definition. As Ioris argues: Indigenous groups are the quintessential targets of resource colonialism and the theft of land and resources (Parson and Ray 2018), but their history and agency did not end with the loss of their land and decimation of members of their society. On the contrary, they continue to claim an Indigenous identity in daily life activities and maintain attachments to places under difficult circumstances.32

This is precisely what the film foregrounds: the adaptability, resistance and survival strategies of the Guaraní-Kaiowá group against necropolitics, which are evident in their settling in the new encampment. It should be now apparent that the film’s mode of address, that is, adapting Elizabeth Ellsworth’s notion, the invisible pedagogical relation between film and audience, is ambivalent. On the one hand, Terra vermelha’s pedagogy functions in quite traditional ways: the film places great importance on verisimilitude and mimesis, as is evident in the dialogues, mise-en-scène and narrative; moreover, the film’s style is far from being experimental: continuity editing, linear narrative and conventional cinematography are all devices that serve the film’s political message of a defence of Indigenous struggle. Yet, in some areas, the film does operate what Ellsworth calls ‘the return of a difference’, a notion that refers to the opening of a ‘logic of possibility’ by ‘films that perform address as paradox’ bringing spectators back to ‘knowledge that they tend to ignore, marginalize, and displace’.33 This applies to the ways in which the film tries to dismantle Western colonial imaginaries by, as I have explained, unsettling the Western gaze and also, I shall add, by enabling identification with the Indigenous characters, who occupy the nearly totality of the mise-en-scène. It also applies to the notion of indigeneity put forward by the film, which is linked not only to elements of culture, but also to economy and territorialization. As I have argued, Terra vermelha shows that, in the case of Guaraní-Kaiowá people, indigeneity ‘complies not only with “pre-conceived categories such as kinship, spirituality and territoriality”’,34 but is also (tragically) linked to capitalism; indigeneity in this film is, hence, ‘a relational category with deep historical, institutional and power-inflicted ontologies [which] plays a very important role in the production of place and space’.35 In so doing, the

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film articulates a notion of indigeneity that goes beyond the bound of Indigenous peoples to the past and link Indigenous people with the core of political-economic processes. Referring to the Guaraní-Kaiowá, Ioris explains this notion as follows: According to the United Nations Indigenous people are distinct because of their existential references to the pre-colonization past and segregation from wider society, but the appropriation of Indigenous land and the exploitation of Indigenous labor (normally achieved through severe violence and, in many cases, the physical elimination of those who refused to submit) put them at the center of capitalist institutions, production processes and socio-ecological trends.36

The violence and extermination of the Guaraní-Kaiowá individuals that respond to the logic of necropolitics linked to capitalist expansion is addressed explicitly in the scenes that follow the confrontation between Moreira and Nádio. A fellow fazendeiro incites Moreira to get rid of the ‘Indios’ and then kills Nádio in front of his people. The fictional killing is a clear reference to the death of the Guaraní-Kaiowá leader Marcos Verón in January 2003. The day before being assassinated, Verón had led a retomada with about 100 people to reclaim their tekoha, which was occupied by the Brasília do Sul ranch. He was beaten and left unconscious by pistoleiros and died a few days later. Verón had been trying to take back their tekoha since 1998, when he had led his first retomada. He had also travelled to Europe to promote the cause of the Guaraní-Kaiowá. In 2011, three pistoleiros (allegedly the gunmen of Jacinto Honorio da Silva Filho, owner of the Brasilia do Sul ranch) were found guilty of kidnapping, torture and conspiracy, but were acquitted of charges of homicide in relation to other members of Verón’s community.37 Sadly, Nádio’s fictional killing ended up being an ominous anticipation of the death of the actor who played him: in 2013, Vilhalva was stabbed to death while sleeping in his hut. Vilhalva had been an activist for the rights of his people, the Guyra Roka community, which had moved to the lands near their tekoha in 2000 and had led several attempts to retake their lands until they succeeded in 2004. According to Survival International, the Minister of Justice recognized Guyra Roka as Guaraní land in 2009; however, the local fazendeiros did not move. Despite Nádio’s killing in one of the final sequences, Terra vermelha seems to end on a more optimistic note. While there is little hope that the Guaraní-Kaiowá people

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now deprived of their leader and his son Irineu (who hangs himself in a previous sequence) will be given their tekoha, the young Osvaldo embraces his shamanic ‘gift’ and defeats Angué. After deciding to hang himself, he changes his mind and leaves us with a close-up of him staring at the camera declaring ‘I won, you lost’.

Cinematic Activism Bechis’s conception of cinema as a tool for social justice and site of learning; the collaboration with Indigenous actors that made the film possible and the context of political commitment evoked at the beginning of the chapter all suggest a correspondence between Terra vermelha and the nuevo cine latinoamericano as well as that of Indigenous filmmaking or video indígena. The nuevo cine latinoamericano developed in the 1960s and 1970s in the wake of the enthusiasm for the Cuban revolution and the political and economic climate of ‘developmentalism’.38 Militant filmmakers such as Julio García Espinoza, in Cuba; Glauber Rocha, in Brazil; Fernando Birri, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, in Argentina; Marta Rodríguez, in Colombia; and Jorge Sanjinés, in Bolivia, theorized and enacted a new cinema, revolutionary in form and content, which engaged in particular with subaltern groups and sought to provoke real social and political change. As Fernando Birri wrote in 1962, ‘by testifying, critically, to this reality—to this sub-reality, this misery—cinema refuses it. It rejects it. It denounces, judges, criticises and deconstructs it. Because it shows matters as they irrefutably are, and not as we would like them to be’.39 The movement played an important role in the development of the Indigenous filmmaking which has emerged in the region since the 1990s. As Gleghorn explains, Sanjinés and Rodríguez, who both worked with Indigenous populations, as well as other mediators, ‘work[ed] towards greater control for Indigenous people in the content and production of audiovisual media, and were key participants in the early development of the field [of Indigenous filmmaking]’.40 Indeed, the very notion of Fourth Cinema put forward by late M¯aori director Barry Barclay in relation to works ‘authored by Indigenous peoples that would in process and aesthetic form challenge dominant versions of indigeneity provided by classical cinema’ was inspired by that of Third Cinema proposed by Solanas and Getino in their well-known 1969 manifesto ‘Towards a Third Cinema’.41 In the last three decades, Indigenous filmmakers in Latin

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America have sought self-representation through media to contest dominant stereotypes of indigeneity, enact resistance and support their political struggles, delineating a filmmaking that, like Barclays’s Fourth Cinema, is ‘embedded in values of reciprocity and participation’ and offers an ‘“internal” perspective that may empower and provide counter-histories for Native peoples’.42 This filmic context facilitates an examination of the type of activism enacted by Terra vermelha. Like the militant filmmakers of the NLC and the Indigenous filmmakers, Bechis’s film is informed by a notion of cinema as an ‘intervention’ in reality.43 Furthermore, Bechis’s notion of ‘urgency’, mentioned already at the beginning of this chapter, resonates, notwithstanding the differences between the two filmmakers, with the poetics of Cuban filmmaker Santiago Álvarez, who declared more than four decades earlier that: ‘We need to make an urgent cinema. We cannot make a cinema in which the making takes too long; one in which, once the idea arises, it takes one, two, three years to bring it to the peoples of Latin America’.44 It is, however, in the influential work of Sanjinés that we might identify significant technical correspondences with Bechis’s films. This is not surprising since both filmmakers collaborated with Indigenous communities in film productions that re-enacted the communities’ conflicts and struggles. Indeed, Sanjinés’s manifesto ‘Problems of Form and Content in Revolutionary Cinema’ (1976) offers valuable clues for approaching Terra vermelha. In his manifesto, Sanjinés advocates for a revolutionary cinema that opposes Western modernization; a cinema committed to intelligibility and collectivity against the auteurism and individualism typical of bourgeois art; a cinema which stimulates critical enquiry as opposed to the ‘passivity’ that characterizes imperialist media’s relationship with spectators. This would be achieved, according to Sanjinés, as follows: [...] we believe that such a transformation [of revolutionary cinema] will be achieved, through contact with the people, their involvement in artistic creation, greater clarity about the goals of popular art, and the abandonment of individualism. Numerous group works and collectively made films already exist, as, very importantly, do examples of popular participation, where the people themselves play roles, make suggestions and become directly involved in the creative act. In such cases, the people

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are already determining methods of work. Closed scripts begin to disappear and dialogue is born from the people’s own prodigiously fertile talent, during the very act of representation. Life itself speaks, in all its force and truth.45

Although Tierra vermelha is not an example of the type of militant cinema of the 1960s–1970s for reasons related to the film’s ideology, form and distribution, it is my contention that Bechis employs several of the techniques that Sanjinés mentions in his manifesto. In terms of representation, the film focuses on ‘the multiple hero’46 and gives centrality to the Indigenous collectivity through mise-en-scène, dialogue and cinematography while the white characters are, as Bechis puts it, nearly accessories. In terms of production and collaboration, Bechis uses some of the strategies put forward by Sanjinés. In his manifesto, Sanjinés explains that the flaws in his Yawar Mallku/Blood of the Condor (1969) derived from the fact that the film’s aesthetics and script were not informed by an active participation of the Indigenous actors; the script, for example, had been written without their collaboration and been learned by heart by the Indigenous cast. Considering this experience, Sanjinés advocated for a strong collaboration with the Indigenous cast: the script should be created with the Indigenous actors and the film language should follow the principle of ‘communicability’, strategies that he applied in his subsequent El coraje del pueblo/The Courage of the People (1971). The making of Terra vermelha seems to ‘follow’ Sanjinés’s recommendations. It was a long process and was preceded by years in which Bechis would travel regularly to the region to establish a relationship with the Guaraní-Kaiowá communities. Once the film entered in its production stage, the filmmaker carried out an extensive period of preparation of the Indigenous actors with Brazilian theatre director Luis Mario. In order to make it intelligible and allow the actors a sense of what kind of narrative they were creating, Bechis decided to shoot the film in a chronological manner. As for the script, the cast did not work with a definitive written text; they would discuss the main ideas to be represented in each scene, and draw them on a wall. Moreover, during the shooting, the script was continuously modified and recreated following the suggestions made by the Indigenous actors and, in particular, by Vilhalva. As Bechis explains, the scriptwriting was a ‘work of disintegration and reconstruction of a new structure following the suggestions and improvisations [of the Indigenous actors]’ for which the filmmaker was helped by Brazilian

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scriptwriter Luiz Bolognesi, who would update the script on the set every day. Vilhalva’s input shaped the mise-en-scène of the film (for example, he and Concianza suggested which trees to use for the suicides scene, and Vilhalva suggested how to arrange the huts of the encampment) as well as several scenes and dialogues.47 Just like the Aymara Indigenous peasants working with Sanjinés, the Guaraní-Kaiowá actors working with Bechis realized how useful the film was as a ‘weapon’ and used it as a ‘means of declaring throughout the country the truth of what had happened’ and was happening to them. In other words, taking part in the film was for them an act of militancy. Their participation underscores the correspondence between Terra vermelha and those interventions of Indigenous filmmakers, which aim to contest dominant stereotypes of indigeneity, enact resistance and support their off-screen political struggles. Sanjinés’s statement that ‘We, the members of the crew, became instruments of the people’s struggle, as they expressed themselves through us’48 resonates with Vilhalva’s discourse to the members of his community when he tells them what the film is about. The Guaraní-Kaiowá leader explains that Bechis’s film will reproduce a reality ‘similar to theirs’ and reassures them that the film will only show what they will tell the filmmaker. This powerful notion of Indigenous secrecy means agency and echoes Rigoberta Menchú’s ending of her testimonio: ‘But, even so, I still hide my Indigenous identity. I still hide what I believe no-one knows, not even an anthropologist, nor an intellectual, no matter how many books they might have, they cannot comprehend all our secrets’.49 Unlike most of the directors of the films analysed in this book, Bechis has not only acknowledged and, indeed, explained in detail how the collaboration with the Indigenous actors functioned, but also participated alongside Schneider, Vilhalva and the other actors in a documentary about the film. This piece (a sort of ‘making of’) is one of the extra features included with the DVD version of the film. While this material would obviously not reach the spectators watching the film in movie theatres, the fact that it has been made available to the interested public or the academic researcher is significant for it allows access to unique information. The documentary includes sequences of the film, footage that shows the shooting process, interviews with the actors in relation to their story as well as interactions between Bechis, Schneider and the Guaraní-Kaiowá community. It illustrates the type of collaboration with the Indigenous actors which I have delineated above but also foregrounds the voices of

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Guaraní-Kaiowá individuals. For example, Vilhalva indicates the importance of wearing his headdress, which he describes as the equivalent of the white men’s tie, and offers the public explanations of how the retomadas are organized, the meaning of the tekoha and Guaraní-Kaiowá’s values; he also describes the attacks by pistoleiros which he and other Indigenous members suffered on his reservation of Guya Roka. The documentary also includes the testimony of an unidentified Indigenous woman commenting on the death of their leader Marcos Verón, while actress Batista Cabreira’s recalls the stories that her grandmother told her about the past when the region was covered by the forest and was full of wild animals which the community would hunt. The documentary might be understood as a further ‘scene of address’ that contributes to the pedagogical dimension of the film and teaches the audience about Guaraní-Kaiowá culture and political struggle. It also offers evidence of the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous cast and crew, who are all represented as ‘equals’; a word that returns in the Indigenous actors’ interventions. Such a relationship appears to be, on the one hand, an affective and political alliance and, on the other hand, an ‘encounter of forms of knowledges’ as Bechis puts it, which brings us back to de Sousa Santos’s notion of (the film as the site of) an ecology of different forms of knowledges. In the documentary, we see, for example, the non-Indigenous crew (including Bechis) taking part in native rituals (Fig. 6.3). The documentary includes footage of the films’s premiere at the 2008 Venice film festival which was mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, and was attended by Indigenous actors Vilhalva, Abrísio da Silva, Concianza Verga, Batista Cabreira and Juca da Silva, who appear alongside Santamaria and Bechis. Similarly, Juca da Silva is captured in the footage delivering her speech in Guarani; her declarations illustrate the type of activism that characterizes Indigenous filmmaking while also re-affirming an understanding of Bechis’s role as a mediator who acted as a ‘vehicle’ of the Guaraní-Kaiowá’s predicament. In that sense, it is worth recalling Sanjinés’s contention that: ‘A film about the people made by an author is not the same as a film made by the people through an author. As the interpreter and translator of the people, such an author becomes their vehicle’.50 Despite not being an Indigenous film, Terra vermelha seems to have allowed a ‘certain’ degree of self-representation and certainly a visibilization of the Guaraní-Kaiowá culture, two key aspects of Indigenous filmmaking according to Cordóva and Salazar: ‘at the center of a poetics

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Fig. 6.3 Actor Ambrósio Vilhalva and director Marco Bechis at the 65th Venice Film Festival

of Indigenous media, we locate socially embedded self representation, or the active process of making culture visible’.51 Considering that Juca da Silva’s speech was delivered at the Venice film festival, it is also worth reflecting further on the role of such festivals in the raising of political consciousness. Indeed, as is the case with the films themselves, film festivals can be sites of learning in which the cinephile film-goer becomes informed about the real struggles of marginalized people. This same pedagogical conceptualization of film festivals has been

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proposed by scholars working specifically in Indigenous and decolonial studies. Without wanting to suggest that a list-A European auteurist film festival such as the Venice one may function in the same way as an Indigenous activist festival or a film festival organized in an educational setting,52 it is worth posing the question whether we might hope to encounter ‘activist’ gestures in film festivals and therefore reconceptualize the latter as platforms for promoting the struggles of subalternized groups and victimized people. Of course, these gestures often remain too ephemeral, thus reducing their cultural and political impact. In that sense, much could be learned by the pedagogical and participatory strategies of Indigenous educational film festivals in order to support specific struggles with more conviction once they are chosen to be represented in a given festival. In relation to Maya films screened at the XIII CLACPI festival, Claudia Arteaga claims that As sites of decolonial education, these films and the festival contribute to the formation of a decolonial attitude, by which a large audience is able to take up the task of committing themselves to the unfinished process of questioning social and internalized colonial legacies, and to define a course of action accordingly. The analysis of the films and the festival not only invited participants to unlearn the dehumanizing ideologies of institutional education, but they also presented Maya cultures and politics as conditions for that transformation. They therefore forge a path towards a decolonial education.53

In his study of festivals of films as decolonial spaces, Neil Bassam argues that the ‘human’ dimension of festivals, which differentiate them from forms of isolated spectatorship, allows for an understanding of festivals as spaces that foster viewers’ emancipation; provided that the festivals are arranged around dialogical and relational dimensions, they can become ‘a decolonized space of politics, culture, and solidarity building’.54 Bearing this view on ‘decolonial festivals’ in mind, it nevertheless remains difficult to evaluate the Venice premiere of Terra vermelha: for if, on the one hand, it certainly granted the film the global visibility sought by both filmmaker and actors, it is equally true that, on the other hand, it might have contributed very little to the Guaraní-Kaiowá struggle because of the very nature of the festival and the festival goers. This, therefore, begs the question as to how fictional commercial films and the sites of circulation of such films might do political and decolonial work if the

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registers they employ and the circuits they inhabit do not necessarily facilitate such an endeavour. Terra vermelha offers a response to the first issue: for, from within the contours of mainstream commercial cinema, the film offers pedagogical engagement and political commitment in all aspects of its production and distribution. Unlike the militant cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, however, its striving for a political response lies in the individual and not in the collectivity. As regards the issue of the film festival circuit, the question is obviously more complex. Among the European festivals, the Berlinale is probably the one that has been most active via initiatives such as the sidebar NATIVe festival and symposia such as the recent World Cinema Fund Day focussing on ‘Decolonizing Cinema’.55 While certainly not site of political struggles, such festivals can, depending on the film programmes and activities arranged around the programmes, not only be sites of visibilization, but also spaces of transient pedagogies that foster, adapting Arteaga’s argument, ‘a decolonial empathy by concrete acts of listening and seeing’.56

Notes 1. Bechis was born in Chile to a Chilean mother and an Italian father. He lived between Sao Paulo and Buenos Aires until his arrest in 1977. Terra vermelha won prizes at the Italian Golden Globes, the Istanbul International Film Festival and the Motovun Film Festival, among others. Bechis defines himself as an Italian and an Argentinean filmmaker. See Roberta Tabanelli, ‘Transnational Memories: An Interview with Marco Bechis,’ Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies 5, No. 1 (2017), 84. 2. The speech is available at https://www.film.it/news/film/dettag lio/art/indio-vs-fazandeiro-la-guerra-di-marco-bechis-10373/. 3. Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 66. 4. Mbembe, Necropolitics, 92. 5. Antonio Ioris, ‘Political Agency of Indigenous Peoples: The Guarani-Kaiowa’s Fight for Survival and Recognition,’ forthcoming in Vibrant–Virtual Brazilian Anthropology, 11 [online] September 25, 2019, available at http://www.vibrant.org.br. Available at https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/233037407.pdf.

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6. Márcia Diéguez Leuzinger and Kylie Lyngard, ‘The Land Rights of Indigenous and Traditional Peoples in Brazil and Australia. Direitos territoriais de populações indígenas e tradicionais no Brasil e na Austrália,’ Revista de Dereito Internacional 13, No. 1 (2016), 421, available at https://www.corteidh.or.cr/tablas/r37573.pdf. 7. Dieguez Leuzinger and Lyngard, ‘The Land Rights,’ 421. 8. Mbembe, Necropolitics, 24. 9. Mbembe, Necropolitics, 77. 10. Ioris, ‘Political Agency,’ 12. 11. Ioris, ‘Political Agency,’ 12. 12. Ioris, ‘Indigenous Peoples Are Collapsing Under Agribusiness Frontiers in Brazil,’ Cultural Survival [online] December 20, 2018, available at https://www.culturalsurvival.org/news/Indige nous-peoples-are-collapsing-under-agribusiness-frontiers-brazil. 13. See the documentary included in the DVD. 14. Tabanelli, ‘Transnational Memories,’ 87. 15. Tabanelli, ‘Transnational Memories,’ 87. 16. Tabanelli, ‘Transnational Memories,’ 89. 17. Gleghorn, ‘Indigenous Filmmaking,’ 170. 18. Sarah Shamash, ‘Locating Sovereignty in the Auto-EthnographicPolitical Poetics of Daily Existence in Two Amazonian Films,’ Postcolonial Directions in Education 8, No. 2 (2019), 199. 19. Shamash, ‘Locating Sovereignty,’ 203. 20. Aline Frey, ‘Resisting Invasions: Indigenous Peoples and Land Rights Battles in Mabo and Terra Vermelha’, Ilha do Desterro 69, No. 2 (2016), 157. 21. Frey, ‘Resisting Invasions,’ 157. 22. Frey, ‘Resisting Invasions,’ 157. 23. Macarena Gómez-Barris, The Extracive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 5. 24. Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone, 5. 25. Frey, ‘Resisting Invasions,’ 159. 26. Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone, 1. 27. Ioris, ‘Political Agency,’ 14. 28. Ioris, ‘Political Agency,’ 22. 29. Ioris, ‘Political Agency,’ 1. 30. Ioris, ‘Political Agency,’ 2. 31. Ioris, ‘Political Agency,’ 2. 32. Ioris, ‘Political Agency,’ 2.

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33. Elizabeth Ellsworth, Teaching Positions:Difference, Pedagogy, and the Power of Address (New York and London: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1997), 147. 34. Antonio Ioris, ‘Indigeneity and Political Economy: Class and Ethnicity of the Guarani-Kaiowa’, forthcoming in Capital and Class, 3 [online] December 20, 2018, available at https://orca.car diff.ac.uk/132790/3/Ioris%2BIndigeneity%2Band%2BPolitical% 2BEconomy%2B%28accepted%29%2BJun%2B2020.pdf. 35. Ioris, ‘Indigeneity and Political Economy,’ 3. 36. Antonio Ioris, ‘Indigenous Labour and Land Resources: Guarani– Kaiowa’s Politic-Economic and Ethnic Challenges,’ Resources 9(7), No. 84 (2020), 3. 37. ‘Remembering Marcos Verón 10 Years on,’ survivalinternational.org [online] January 13, 2013, available at https://www.sur vivalinternational.org/news/8917; Sue Branford, ‘Chief Marcos Verón: Brazilian Indian Leader Who Died Fighting for His People’s Rights,’ The Guardian [online] January 28, 2003, available at https://www.theguardian.com/news/2003/jan/28/gua rdianobituaries 38. John King, Magical Reels: A History of Cinema in Latin America (London and NY, Verso, 2000), 67. 39. Quoted in King, Magic Reels, 217. 40. Gleghorn, ‘Indigenous Filmmaking,’ 172. 41. Gleghorn, ‘Indigenous Filmmaking,’ 170. 42. Gleghorn, ‘Indigenous Filmmaking,’ 168–170. 43. Gleghorn, ‘Indigenous Filmmaking,’ 182. 44. Quoted in Mario Jacob, ‘Soy un animal politicón. Entrevista exclusiva a Santiago Álvarez’, in Hojas de cine. Testimonios y documentos del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano. Volumen III, eds., AA.VV. (México DF: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 1988), 79– 84. 45. Jorge Sanjinés, ‘Problems of Form and Content in Revolutionary Cinema (Bolivia, 1976),’ in Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures. A Critical Anthology, ed., Scott MacKenzie (Oakland: University of California Press, 2021), 288. 46. Sanjinés, ‘Problems of Form,’ 288. 47. See the documentary included in the DVD. 48. Sanjinés, ‘Problems of Form,’ 289. 49. Menchú, Me llamo, 271.

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50. Sanjinés, ‘Problems of Form,’ 288. 51. Amalia Córdova and Juan Francisco Salazar, ‘Imperfect Media Imperfect Media and the Poetics of Indigenous Video in Latin America,’ in Global Indigenous Media: Cultures, Poetics and Politics, eds., Pamela Wilson and Michelle Stewart (New York: Duke University Press, 2008), 40. 52. On the difference between Indigenous and mainstream film festivals, see note 72 of Chapter 1. 53. Claudia Arteaga, ‘The Decolonial Empathy of Two Maya Documentaries Shown at the XIII CLACPI Film Festival: FicMayab,’ Postcolonial Directions in Education 8, No. 2 (2019), 229–230. 54. Neil Bassam, ‘Festivals of Films, Decolonial Spaces, and Public Pedagogy: Some Preliminary Reflections,’ Postcolonial Directions in Education 8, No. 2 (2019), 88. 55. On the function (and limitations) of these initiatives see note 72 of Chapter 1 and also Peirano’s article ‘NATIVe—A Journey into Indigenous Cinema’. 56. Arteaga, ‘The Decolonial Empathy,’ 212.

CHAPTER 7

Coevalness, Indigenous Modernity and Indigenization: El sueño del mara’akame (2016)

In this chapter, I consider another film which developed from a relationship (in this case, as an affective rather than political alliance) between Indigenous and non-Indigenous individuals. El sueño del mara’akame (2016), the debut work of Mexican filmmaker Federico Cecchetti, originated from the friendship between Cecchetti and the mara’akame (an Indigenous Wixárica shaman) Antonio Parra Haka Temai. The film was produced in 2016 by the CUEC, the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos (nowadays ENAC Escuela Nacional de Artes Cinematográficas) of the Mexican Autonomous University [UNAM], among whose alumni are well-known directors such as Alfonso Cuarón, Fernando Eimbcke and Maria Novaro. It is spoken in the Wixárica language and was shot in the Wixárica territories in the state of Jalisco, as well as in the Wirikuta desert in Real de Catorce, and in Mexico City. The film was received very well by film critics who praised the presence of nonprofessional Indigenous actors and its dealing with current issues faced by the Wixárica population; its merging of documentary realism and the supernatural; and its overcoming of both exoticization and the patronizing indigenista narrative that has been dominant in Mexican cinema on Indigenous peoples. In 2017, it was awarded two Silver Ariel—the prizes of the Mexican Academy of Film Award—for best opera prima and best original music (composed by Emiliano Motta). It was also screened in international festivals in Chicago and Austin. Despite being quite © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. C. D’Argenio, Indigenous Plots in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93914-4_7

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successful in the academic and cinephile circuits, it reached the movie theatres only in 2019 and did not enjoy international distribution beyond a number of cultural institutions. El sueño del mara’akame tells the story of the coming-of-age of Nieri (played by first-time actor Luciano Batista Maxa Temai), a Wixárika teenager and son of a mara’akame (played by Parra). Nieri is represented at the crossroad of two seemingly opposite worlds: shamanism and modern music. While his father wants Niereme (as he calls him) to follow his footsteps and the destiny assigned to him by becoming a mara’akame, Nieri (as his friends call him) wants to sing in the local band Peligro Sierreño and play with them in a concert in Mexico City. The film depicts Nieri navigating these two worlds and handling his father’s opposition to his music, which the mara’akame sees as morally corrupted. Indeed, the narrative crafts an opposition between the sacred chants sung by the mara’akames , in ceremonies and rituals, and the hedonism of Peligro sierreño’s songs, which revolve around boy-meets-girl stories. Yet it will be thanks to the concert in the Mexican capital that Nieri will finally embrace his fate to become a mara’akame. Although the plot might seem to focus on the clash between modernity (represented by modern music) and tradition (represented by the mara’akames ’s world of dreams and songs), I would instead suggest that the film challenges and overcomes such a binary in favour of a notion of Indigenous modernity and Indigenous coevalness, while also exemplifying the activism vs ‘activation’ dichotomy mentioned in the first chapter. In what follows, I draw on formal analysis as well as on an interview with the filmmaker to propose a threefold argument: first, I explore the decolonial potential of the affective relationship that informed the film’s production and the conceptual usefulness of the category of (non-Indigenous) ‘listening’ instead of (Indigenous) ‘speaking’; second, I analyse the function of music in articulating a notion of Indigenous modernity and I also argue that the film production and plot bear testament to real processes of the Indigenization of media; third, I ponder the ways in which the film relates to current processes of cultural and natural extractivism faced by the Wixaritari, and suggest that El sueño del mara’akame invites a rethinking of the notion of politics. Ultimately, through this holistic analysis I argue that El sueño del mara’akame can be understood as an example of ethical filmmaking based on notions of alliance and reciprocity.

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The Economy of Listening and the Affective Possibilities of Film Like Terra vermelha, El sueño del mara’akame deals with the culture and struggles of a real Indigenous group and casts real non-professional Indigenous actors who play characters similar to themselves. The Huichol (as they are called in Spanish) or Wixárica (as they call themselves) population (also known as the Wixaritari, which is the plural for Wixárica) are approximately 45,000 people who live in the Sierra Madre Occidental mountain range, in the states of Durango, Jalisco, Nayarit and Zacatecas.1 They are one of the sixty eight Indigenous populations living in Mexico and have a history of at the same time resistance to colonization, and of contact with foreign Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations. Having resisted the Spanish conquerors, the Wixaritari were onlyevangelized by the Franciscans in the eighteenth century after the battle of the Mesa del Nayar (1722). Even as their temples were destroyed to construct Catholic churches, the Wixaritari would later be allowed to rebuild their calihuey or tukipa temples and the missionaries were thrown out of their territory in the nineteenth century; today, the physical structures of the original churches are mostly used for Wixárica ceremonial practices.2 In the eighteenth century, the Wixaritari received land titles that have since defined the communal ownership of and limits of the lands; they are, however, constantly under the threat of territorial usurpation by ranch owners and extractivist companies. Over the last few decades, the communities have faced, on the one hand, important migration processes, and, on the other, the incorporation of ‘modern’ elements such as mass media communications3 ; even so, as scholars explain, the Wixáritari have always been in contact with other Indigenous groups as well as with mestizo people (that they call teiwari). The film opens with the sound of footsteps while the credits scroll on the black screen. Then, a point of view shot shows human shadows in a rural landscape through a yellow filter. It is the view filtered through the yellow bandana of Nieri, who has been taken, blindfolded, to the Wirikuta desert in order to take part in the Wixárica pilgrimage. The Wirikuta is a sacred territory where the Wixaritari travel once a year under the guidance of the maraka’ames, only to be later joined by their families. An integral part of this pilgrimage, as evidenced in the film, is for the mara’akames — who are healing and singing shamans—to sing sacred chants and to search for the sacred peyote cactus, which is taken home and used in ceremonies.

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This initial sequence, as indeed most of the film, is shot in a documentary style. The use of handheld camera and natural lighting, the presence of real Wixaritari as main actors as well as extras, and a mise-en-scène which reproduces an actual pilgrimage to Wirikuta, all contribute, not only to the realism of the fiction but to its ethnographic dimension. Indeed, for Paul Liffmann El sueño del mara’akame is an ‘ethnofiction’, by which he means ‘an ethnographic fiction produced through a collaboration with non-professional Indigenous actors, not only for the construction of the mise-en-scène, but also for the elaboration of the script and sometimes even for the most fundamental conceptualization of the film’.4 While the film certainly corresponds to these characteristics, I would, nonetheless, contend that El sueño del mara’akame is not an ethnofiction in the sense given to the term by Paul Stoller, who used this notion in relation to the celebrated pioneering work of Jean Rouch. As Stoller writes, ethnofiction ‘is not a documentary that attempts to capture an observed reality. […] These films are stories based on laboriously researched and carefully analysed ethnography. In this way Rouch uses creative licence to “capture” the texture of an event, the ethos of lived experience’.5 El sueño del mara’akame does convey a sense of the ethos of the Wirikatari’s real lived experience as well as of their rituals and ‘modes of knowing’6 ; however, it was not informed by a ‘laboriously researched and carefully analysed ethnography’, but rather by what can be described (following Cecchetti’s own re-telling) as a friendship and communal experience of trust and sharing. This is relevant for gauging the type of partnership that informs the film production and its implications in terms of screening the Indigenous experience (Fig. 7.1). The film was made in 2016 after a long writing period of four years. Cecchetti came to know the Wixaritari in Real de Catorce when he was working on his thesis, a documentary on the Mexican Revolution. He was then introduced to the mara’akame Parra (who belongs to La Cebolleta community) by a common friend and was asked by Parra to shoot the graduation ceremony at his daughter’s primary school. From then on, Cecchetti would travel regularly to La Cebolleta living there for long periods of time, taking part in the Wixárica daily life and learning about their culture. Parra took him along on two pilgrimages and allowed the filmmaker to participate in Wixárica ceremonies, including healing sessions in Mexico City, where Parra had worked previously. Thus, while I would share Liffmann’s assessment that the novelty of El sueño del mara’akame is the collaboration with the Indigenous actors, I underscore

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Fig. 7.1 Wixárica extras during the shooting of El sueño del mara’akame (Courtesy of Federico Cecchetti)

that the film’s mode of production is also shaped by an affective relationship. I would suggest that it is this relationship that unsettles the power dynamics embedded in the colonial and ethnographic encounters. By the same token, the relationship displaces academic rigour and research in favour of friendship and to such an extent that the notion of the outsider’s ‘gaze’ was replaced by the sense of a shared partnership. The film’s mode of production also enables Indigenous agency, as is the case with other inter/cultural films analysed in this book. The script of El sueño del mara’akame stemmed from the conversations between Cecchetti and Parra as well as with the other members of La Cebolleta community. Once written in Spanish, it was translated into the Wixárica language by the Indigenous actors. While Bautista would translate his lines quickly, Parra would take the script for days, translate it with his daughters and return it to Cecchetti, transformed and adapted to the Wixárica language and epistemology. Echoing what had been explained by Ambrosio Vilhalva, Parra and the other Wixaritari were the ones who decided the terms on which their culture, lifestyle and ways of knowing

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were going to be represented on the screen; what they would share and agree to show. For example, they did not permit their real rituals to be screened but agreed to recreating them for the film.7 They also retained spaces of ‘non-communication’ and ‘non-explanation’ such as in the case of the chants; these were improvised and not translated so that their meanings were therefore only understandable to Wixárika speakers. In that sense, to some extent the film frustrates a Western ‘epistephilia’ or ‘desire to know,’ and those ‘models of explanation’ which, as Gleghorn suggests, have shaped Western-authored Indigenous fictional and documentary representations.8 The ‘economy of learning’ that Gleghorn sees as problematic in Indigenous representation made for Western consumption is played out interestingly in El sueño del mara’akame. Through the absence of Western characters, the film’s mise-en-scène avoids the knowledge-transfer that is implicated in the non-Western/Western teacher–student, elder–younger and shaman–disciple relationship, which might be, as Gleghorn suggests, a metaphor of controversial spectatorial politics.9 The film’s few ‘scenes of address’ are those of father and son, in which the former teaches his child about the function of dreams, or are rather moments of collective storytelling whereby Wixárica myths and narratives are shared. Offscreen, however, such a relationship was key, since it informed, and even allowed, the very existence of this film. Cecchetti describes himself as a learner moved by a (Western) ‘desire to know’.10 We should therefore ask whether such a desire might lead to an ethical engagement with Indigenous knowledge, not shaped by coloniality. Gleghorn’s reading of El abrazo de la serpiente demonstrates that there are specific power dynamics entrenched in the Westerner’s conception of Indigenous knowledge as something interpretable and transmissible and, as I argued in a previous chapter, the way the filmmakers position themselves epistemically can inadvertently evoke colonialist asymmetries. Notwithstanding those dynamics, I suggest that, in the case of El sueño del mara’akame, the ‘knowledge-politics’11 is different because of the affective and epistemic relationship between the Indigenous shaman and the non-Indigenous filmmaker, precisely because of the latter’s positionality (Fig. 7.2). The first aspect to consider is that the teaching/learning situation was established by the mara’akames on their own terms. For example, Parra transformed the learning experience from an intellectual to an embodied one by inviting Cecchetti to take part in the daily life of the community rather than simply answering to the filmmaker’s questions himself.

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Fig. 7.2 Actors Antonio Parra Haka Temai and Luciano Batista Maxa Temai during the shooting of El sueño del mara’akame (Courtesy of Federico Cecchetti)

Secondly, the learner’s positioning of epistemic vulnerability or lack might metaphorically reverse the colonizing teaching enterprise since it is not undermined by the totalizing narratives that suit film markets and audience consumption, as we have seen in the case of Guerra. Cecchetti does not present himself as a mediator of Wixárica indigeneity or ‘custodian’ of Indigenous culture, as has been claimed in relation to Guerra. Instead, and thirdly, in the interviews and press conference, the filmmaker’s narrative emphasizes partiality, relativism and respect. The filmmaker presents El sueño del mara’akame as his own teiwari view of the Wixárica way of life and ontology.

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I would not dismiss, however, the notion of the filmmaker as a ‘listener’. In fact, it might be conceptually profitable to replace the notion of teacher/student and shaman/discipline with that of Indigenous speaker/non-Indigenous listener. Studies on media, representation and marginalized peoples (as indeed my own arguments advanced in this book) have tended to focus on voices and ‘speaking out’ instead of listening. Following the influential and often-cited essay of Gayatri Spivak ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, studies on minoritized and racialized groups have focused on the representation, possibilities and limitations of ‘granting’ voice to the subalternized subject. Published in 1988, Spivak’s essay pointed to the impossibility of hearing the subaltern’s voice insofar their voice is mediated by the non-subaltern subject and, hence, a different epistemology and the technology of writing. In Latin America, this issue was taken up by critics of testimonio studies who questioned whether testimonio was an institution of domination instead of an act of solidarity and whether it actually enabled Indigenous agency. More recently, interesting perspectives have been advanced by studies of filmic testimonio, which have posed the question in rather different terms. Isabel Seguí, for example, suggests examining the figure of the ‘intermediario’ [the mediator] and their political agenda and, hence, goes beyond the debate around authenticity and voice.12 A further step to overcome the limits inherent to the study of ‘voices’ might be the study of the conditions whereby the ‘listening’ of those voices is possible. As Tanja Dreher suggests, ‘in order to adequately understand and contribute to struggles for media change’, media research needs to attend to the politics of ‘listening’ in addition to the dynamics of ‘speaking up’.13 Scholars like Dreher advocate for shifting the focus from the fact of ‘giving voice’ to the fact of ‘who is listening, how they are listening and the conditions of listening’, which in turns means to ‘change from marginalized voices and on to the conventions, institutions and privileges which shape who and what can be heard in media’.14 Although this book is not concerned with those types of analysis which would imply a study of the platforms where the voices represented in the films become audible, films like Terra vermelha and El sueño del mara’akame point to the need to consider the politics of listening. Bechis’s activist film is clearly directed at moving the audience emotionally and politically to generate awareness of and support for the Kaiowá-Guaraní fight. The politicization of the Venice festival analysed in the last chapter served that purpose. El sueño del mara’akame, if analysed beyond formal analysis, exemplifies a film based on reciprocity

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in which the filmmaker mediates between his authorial project and the Wixárica’s own agenda. As will become clear in the last section of this chapter, this film too foregrounds the need to listen to the Indigenous voice off-screen in order to contrast endangering neocolonial extractivist projects as well as the hegemonic functioning of politics. Unfortunately, the circulation of the film has been reduced due to the bureaucracy of the CUEC, hence limiting its potential impact in making the Wixárica voice hearable.

Indigenous Modernity and Indianized Music The documentary-style depiction of aspects of the life of the mara’akames is juxtaposed with the coming-of-age narrative centred on Nieri. Starting from the initial sequence of the pilgrimage, Nieri is depicted as a teenager navigating the two worlds of shamanism and music. Interestingly, while the narrative displays an opposition between the two via the father’s disapproval of Nieri’s music, the mise-en-scène stages more complex transcultural dynamics. Nieri moves between different traditions and cultural expressions. He takes part in Wixaritari rituals and communal everyday activities; he accompanies his father in his healing sessions,and he also joins the rehearsals of the Peligro Sierreño band whenever he can. In the initial pilgrimage and search for peyote, we see him dressed in a combination of Western clothes and traditional Wixárica clothes, while wearing headphones. Once on the bus to reach another location, he puts on the headphones to listen to ‘modern’ music. In another sequence, he goes from helping his father with traditional chores to speaking to his friends, who allegorize a ‘modernity’ supposedly opposed to Indigenous ‘tradition’. Nieri’s friends are immersed in a chaotic ‘Western’ culture of fun, hedonism and triviliality: they have a jeep, watch music videoclips, drink alcohol, sing and talk about girls; moreover, they tease Nieri and his father for their clothing and show disregard for their land. Nieri’s attraction towards this world (he drinks with them, decorates his room with music posters, and looks at images of naked girls) and his conflict with his father contributes to the dual narrative. Nevertheless, beyond plot level, we discern more composite narratives of modernity and identity through the musical aspect of the film. In fact, instead of a representation of a foreign or mestizo Westernized modernity, I would suggest that the group Peligro Sierreño represents allegorically and metonymically an ‘Indigenous modernity’. Allegorically,

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since the musicians embody such modernity in the film. Metonymically, because they are in fact a fictional transposition of an existing phenomenon—the tradition of modern Huichol regional music. This is further represented in the film by the actual group Huichol musical which appears in the concert scene as well as in the music videoclips screened on a small television during the rehearsals. In that sense, my reading expands that of Liffmann, who maintains that the ‘combination of rock, rancheras, mariachi from the Gran Nayar and Wixárika ceremonial music embodies an Indigenous modernity’.15 Taking my cue from Liffmann, and drawing on studies of Indigenous music, I delve into the articulation of an Indigenous modernity by considering, on the one hand, the filmic reality of Wixárica/Huichol music and, on the other hand, the film’s casting process; further, I suggest that via the Peligro Sierreño band, the film engages with real processes of the indigenization of media. The film’s soundtrack includes a combination of different types of diegetic music, including the mara’akames music and chants, and urban street music (as well as the non-diegetic electronic music composed by Motta), but the genre Nieri listens to and plays belongs to what is known as música regional Huichol [Huichol regional music].16 This expression refers to a regional music played with Western instruments including violin, double bass and/or acoustic-electric guitar (the latter is employed in the subgenre known as sierreña music), which combines rancheras, corridos and, in some cases, cumbia, and is often sung in the Wixárica language, as are the songs heard in the film. Huichol groups perform in town squares and at local or family ceremonies; in addition to playing music, they also often perform the traditional zapatera dance, which Nieri also performs in the rehearsal in a sort of ‘spiced up’ version. As Nolan Warden explains, originally, these Wixárica groups had appeared in the 1970 and 1980s and, by the end of the 1980s, there was a band in nearly every Wixárika community. Initially singing in Spanish, it then became common to sing in their native language in the 1990s,17 possibly following the success of the group Venado Azul, one of the first bands to enjoy national success and whose song ‘Nemu’ta’ is one of the main themes of the film. The other group that appears in the film, both on the soundtrack and as protagonist is, as I have already said, the well-known Huichol Musical, considered ‘the ‘quintessential “modern” Huichol group’.18 After touring the US and being nominated for both a Grammy and a Premio Lo Nuestro award, Huichol musical are

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now well-known nationally and internationally, and their videos are widely accessible on YouTube. Huichol regional music is hence a combination of mestizo elements (instruments, language) and Indigenous ones (clothing, dance, language); as such, ‘[it] serves as a ‘“bridge” between the two worlds [mestizo and Indigenous]’19 or, in other words, as a contact zone. Importantly, it is considered, as Warden points out, a ‘modern’ (and not a traditional) music by the Wixaritari in contrast to their traditional music or música tradicional Wixárica, which is played with the traditional instruments xaweri and kanari. Although Huichol regional music is not the first musical genre to incorporate and adapt elements from outside music since ‘the xaweri and kanari are clear examples of earlier teiwari [mestizo] influences that were adopted to the point of being understood as autochthonous’,20 it functions, following Warden, as a more complex contact zone because of its production and insertion in capitalism. Unlike Wixárica traditional music, Huichol music is recorded for commercial purposes. If ‘[s]eeing Wixárika musicians on a recording came as a shock for many other Wixaritari’, today several musicians are professional performers touring the country.21 Confirming that identity is ultimately a process of ‘becoming’, as Hall famously argued,22 Huichol music is a field of identity construction and a further marker of identity, alongside others such as language, clothing, and dance. ‘Huicholness’ denotes this ‘commercial’ identity performed for the non-Huichol people and, therefore entails both self-representation and commodification.23 Indeed, Huichol music is both a commercialized form entangled in capitalist modes of production and circulation, and a conscious gesture of self-determination, as well as a negotiation with a modernity which no longer lies outside of the Indigenous sphere. As such, it is one of the many ways in which Indigenous groups challenge the ‘old stereotype of the “vanishing native” standing passive in the face of the overwhelming forces of modernity’.24 As Warden observes: ‘The reluctance on the part of some Mestizos to see this as “modern” music is likely because Wixárika musicians playing modern popular music—and being exceptionally successful in doing so—is a case of “Indians in unexpected places”’.25 However, such development has brought important consequences such as the absence of band members from their community, a condition felt as conflictive by some musicians. In that sense, to a certain extent this music implies what anthropologist Faye Ginsburg defined as a ‘Faustian contract’ for Indigenous peoples, which involves,

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on the one hand, ‘finding new modes for expressing indigenous identity through media’ and, on the other, ‘using technologies and media practices that may threaten their knowledges and societies.26 The ways in which mestizo non-Indigenous music has been reworked by the Wixárica population can be understood as an example of ‘Indigenization’ of media, a term that signals the Indigenous appropriation of the technologies of the dominant society and their transformation ‘[in]to their own uses in order to meet their own cultural and political needs’.27 Frida Schiwy examines this process in Andean media and employs the notion of ‘Indianizing film’, that is, ‘the capacity of indigenous cultures to integrate European elements into their own symbolic and social orders’.28 As anthropologists who have studied Huichol music explain: The history of Mestizo music in the sierra is one of outsider music (teiwari kwikarieya) becoming adopted from the periphery and being made central (wixárika kwikarieya). It has, since its earliest days, always been about newness, the latest hits, and grupos del momento (groups of the moment). It has come into its own and continued to thrive because of its utilization of the mass media.29

El sueño del mara’akame not only transposes this dynamic from offscreen reality, but also contributes to an anti-colonial representation of the Huichol musicians by crafting a ‘horizontal’ soundtrack. Huichol music coexists in a non-hierarchical manner with music genres linked to urban street culture such as the non-instrumental rap performed by young boys that Nieri encounters in the metro, or the music performed by a band of blind musicians playing on the streets of the city centre. Those are real musicians who belong to a city configured as the epitome of modernity. By combining modern Huichol music with modern urban music in the film’s soundtrack and, moreover, through the presence of Wixárica musicians (the fictional Peligro Sierreño and the real Huichol Musical group) at the concert in the capital, El sueño del mara’akame crafts a symbolic coexistence of musicians and music which highlights the divergent and dynamic identities and modernities that often interact with each other in contemporary Mexico.The colonialist denial of coevalness in the country is thus revealed to be untenable. The casting process of the band Peligro Sierreño further supports my argument that this film reflects real processes of Indigenization of

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media and also invites reflection on the function and limits of nonIndigenous/Indigenous partnerships in inter/cultural films for global consumption. The band was put together by Cecchetti after a casting on YouTube with youngsters who are real Wixárica musicians; each of the members had their own group and the song they sing in the film was authored by one of them; Cecchetti chose this particular song because it offered a suitable representation of the distance between such music and the sacred chants of the mara’akames. The fictional group mirrors the real exponents of sierreño music, who usually perform in Western clothes and are ‘often thought to be more “acculturated”’30 (although some of them in the press conference wore Wixárica clothing). Cecchetti’s encounter with those youngsters was at the very heart of the film. While the idea of making a film about the Wixaritari stemmed from his friendship with Parra and his involvement with the community, the actual plot originated from his encounter with Wixárica youth in San Andrés Cohamiata, where the filmmaker went to run a photography workshop. It was here that he encountered a very lively music youth culture playing sierreño music and sharing their videos on YouTube. Hence, just as this extra-filmic anecdote provides useful information as to the context of production of this film, it also allows further reflection on the notion of Indigenous modernity and Indigenization or Indianization of mass media. For example, it attests to Indigenous familiarity with and use of digital technologies and mass media ‘as a mode of self-expression and representation’ as well as ‘important tools for the revitalization of Indigenous cultures among youth’.31 Consequently, it also represents a challenge to the imperialist and racist depictions of Indigenous people which dominate mainstream media. In her study of the circulation of Maya rock on YouTube, Alicia Ivonne Estrada maintains that Maya groups are making strategic use of ‘such media to circulate works (songs) that are about Maya knowledges and culture’.32 Hence, they create a space of self-representation and identification for both musicians and fans but also a space for debates and conversation, which foster awareness of issues impacting Maya communities.33 The extent to which this can also be applied to Huichol and sierreño music videos circulating on YouTube would require a study beyond the scope of this book, but suffice to say that in the case of Huichol music the notion of ‘engagement’ and the presence of politics are more diluted. The songs of Huichol musical, for example, sometimes deal with politics (an example is the song ‘La visca’, sung in Spanish, on the Arizona immigration laws) but this does not seem to be a dominant

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theme; in fact, a glance at the videos of the songs in Spanish on Youtube suggests that many of the songs mirror the themes evoked by Peligro sierreño. The comments of fans on YouTube are mostly from people who love the music but do not speak the language. This points to a landscape more multifaceted, then, than that of Maya rock. Regardless of the actual political content of the songs, what is certain is that ‘the use of Huicholness by Wixaritari is often a conscious and strategic decision’34 if not in political, certainly in cultural terms. Therefore, Ginsburg’s notion of ‘strategic traditionalism’ seems apt for describing the Wixaritari adoption and transformation of Western music and media. By ‘strategic traditionalism’, Ginsburg refers to ‘the selfconscious way in which they [Indigenous communities]—like many other people—use the production of media and other expressive forms not only to sustain and build their communities but also to transform them’.35 In the introduction to the volume Indigenous Global Media, which includes Ginsburg’s chapter, the editors claim that ‘all of the contributions to this collection can be seen as strategically traditionalist in that they endeavour to protect the distinctive values of community traditions while simultaneously recognizing that culture itself is a living, dynamic organism’.36 This begs the question whether a film like El sueño del mara’akame can be conceived of as a similar endeavour.

Activism and/or Activation The trailer of the film’s commercial release emphasizes a rather conventional narrative structure focused on the figure of the teenager: Nieri’s coming-of-age involves an exploration of the ‘prohibited’, rebellion against his father, a journey to Mexico City, where he experiments racial discrimination and a denouement in which the youth finally embraces shamanism. Child-centred and coming-of-age character-driven narratives are recurrent in the cinematic turn traced in this book and indeed characteristics of the global art-house aesthetics of contemporary Latin American ‘festival films’, which ‘facilitates transnational border crossing’ and ‘generate[s] critical acclaim’ among the audience.37 Those narratives are articulated quite differently in each film. In Madeinusa and Retablo, for example, the young protagonist rebels against conservatism and violence at home. Meanwhile, in El sueño del mara’akame, in a manner more reminiscent of Terra vermelha, the teenager is depicted in a state of in-betweenness relating not only to ages, but also cultures and

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epistemologies. As in the case of Terra vermelha, the focus on a minor allows, on the one hand, an exploration of shamanism and, on the other, of the reality faced by Indigenous individuals once they find themselves outside their community. The first narrative path is centred around the notion of dreams; Nieri’s dream of the blue deer towards the end of the film signals his process of becoming a mara’akame. The second narrative, which I would like to analyse in this section, is shaped by discrimination as well as the appropriation of Wixárica ways of knowing in present-day Mexico. The film shows the lack of recognition of Indigenous people and ontologies in the nation-state; for example, what is a sacred plant for the Wixárica is an illegal drug for the state authority, which must be discovered and confiscated. This is exactly what happens to the two characters who are searched by the police on their way to Mexico City. Once in the capital, Nieri faces further discrimination when he is attacked and robbed by some youngsters. The focus on the teenager, a character who ‘feels’ rather than ‘interpreting’ the world around him,38 engages the spectator emotionally and thus invites an encounter with the problems facing the Wixárica through affect rather than cognitive enquiry. Yet, in accordance with Podalsky’s and Ahmed’s theorisations of affect, such an encounter does not preclude a political potential: the ability to increase spectatorial empathy triggers a critical reflection on the interaction between Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations in a different way from what we have seen so far via the trope of music. This interaction not only consists of discrimination and lack of recognition, but also of a Western fascination with Wixárica shamanism. Once in the capital, Nieri and his father go to a wealthy house where a ‘white’ middle-class lady pays Nieri’s father for leading a private peyote healing session. The session takes place in the garden of the house where a number of other non-Indigenous people are gathered. The lady shows familiarity with and a supposed knowledge of Wixárica practices although the film reveals that she is mistaken in her assumptions. For example, she makes her friend throw up in the fire, which is a sacred element. That act is condemned by the mara’akame who asks forgiveness from the deities. This episode conveys a real phenomenon occurring in urban areas (private healing sessions with mara’akames ), which can be understood as part of the broader trend of so-called mystical-spiritual tourism. In the last two decades, a number of places emblematic of pre-Hispanic culture within Latin America have become the destination of ‘touristic speculations’39 ; among them, there are the Wixárica sacred territories

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such as the Wirikuta desert. Tourists take part in and ‘reappropriate’ the Indigenous peregrination to the Wirikuta desert through a ‘mestizo cult of the peyote’ and are initiated to Wixárica beliefs and practices through direct or indirect contact with a local community.40 In Mexico, this type of tourism has developed since the 1990s following the success of tales of Neo-shamanism by authors from the 1960s such as Carlos Castaneda. Neo-shamanism is the Western rediscovery and reappropriation of Indigenous practices. According to Vincent Basset, mysticalspiritual tourism and Neo-shamanism draw on a notion of Indigeneity as ‘“typical, truthful and eternal”’.41 The episode in the film is an example of such practices. The participants allegorize the category of tourists known as ‘psychonauts’, a term proposed by Ernest Jünger to describe people who voluntarily alter their mental state to explore their mind, soul and consciousness. The tourist-psychonaut holds a fascination for the Amerindian people mediated by the notion of good savage and authenticity and perceives the Indigenous subject as an individual of knowledge or potential shaman.42 As I have noted, the film clearly aims to be critical of this phenomenon, but what is even more crucial is that El sueño del mara’akame undermines the notion of an Indigeneity bound to the past and of an authenticity that informs those practices; instead, Indigenous characters are represented as coeval with non-Indigenous ones, as engaging with the present, and the future, while maintaining their ancient traditions. The film also links Indigeneity to issues of territory and politics, and hence, not simply to ‘being Indigenous’, as I will go on to explain. The last way in which El sueño del mara’akame engages with Wixárica indigeneity is via foregrounding their being bound to territory and the present-day threats to their ways of knowing and practices. At the time of Cecchetti’s involvement with the Wixaritari, they were fighting against the State’s support for mining exploitation in the Wirikuta desert—a sacred territory in Wixárica cosmogony, where the origins of the Universe lie and where the Wixaritari carries out a yearly pilgrimage. The territory was declared a ‘Site of Cultural and Historic Heritage and an Area under Ecological Conservation’ in 1994 and a ‘Sacred Natural Site’ comprising a protected area of 140 thousand hectares by UNESCO in 2001. Despite this status and the fact that in 2008 President Felipe Calderón signed the Hauxa Manaka Accord, which ensured further protection to Wixárica sacred land, in 2010, the Mexican government gave twenty-two concessions to the Canadian mining company First Majestic Silver, the vast majority of which were located in the Wirikuta. The following year,

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other concessions were given to the Canadian mining company Revolution Resources. Supported by other organizations, the Wixaritari created a civil movement to oppose such projects, to fight mining extractivism in Wirikuta, and to demand the cancellation of the concessions. The film offers a fictional recreation of a music festival which was held in 2012 to generate funds in support of the movement and the legal defence of Wirikuta. The concert where the Peligro Sierreño plays in the film represents the festival—the Wirikuta Fest —at the Foro Sol in Mexico City which was also aimed at supporting the implementation of sustainable projects and hence, alternative working opportunities to those offered by the mine and agro-industry in the region. The end result was that the Wixárica opposition was successful and the concessions were removed, although the danger of land exploitation is still present. El sueño del mara’akame engages with such attempts at neocolonial exploitation and foregrounds Indigenous agency in opposing such projects: on the bus during the pilgrimage, the Wixaritari see a truck belonging to the mining company; in a subsequent scene, they hold an assembly to decide how to proceed to fight against the mine expropriation. The more explicit instances in which the film refers to extractivism are, however, paratextual. Before the title appears on the screen, we read: Wixárika, or Huichol people, are one of the most ancient Mexican cultures. One of the few cultures whose oldest traditions are well preserved. Every year, they embark upon a pilgrimage to the sacred desert of Wirikuta to be in communion with their gods through Peyote. Today, this magic land is in danger.

At the end of the film, another paratextual element reads: The UNESCO has declared the Wirikuta desert a protected and sacred site of world patrimony. Nevertheless, in 2010 the Mexican government granted 22 concessions to a Canadian company to begin mining for silver in the region. The project would have had devastating consequences for the Wixárica community and the environment. The Wixárica people united in resistance to the plans and for the time being have won the battle, Even so, the mining industry remains a threat lurking silently in the shadows.

The framing of narratives is key; as Barbara Babcock argues in relation to oral storytelling, ‘‘‘beginnings” and “endings” are of crucial importance in the formulation of systems of culture’.43 Frame narratives are instances

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of self-commentary and ‘mark narrative points at which issues of identity, identification, and self-representation are particularly freighted and visible’.44 In the case of an inter/cultural film made by non-Indigenous filmmakers, framing can be a mechanism for supporting Indigenous/nonIndigenous solidarity and even activism. This appears to be the case in El sueño del mara’akame. In negotiating the making of the film with the Wixaritari, Cecchetti proposed using the film to support their fight against mine companies and, according to the filmmaker, that was a key motivation for the Wixaritari’s agreeing to take part in the project. This act of reciprocity, then, represents another means whereby non-Indigenous social actors might engage with Indigenous communities ethically. The framing of the conflict over the Wirikuta within a plot focusing largely on Wixárica ways of knowing and life ultimately serves to reconfigure such territorial conflicts as equally epistemic disputes. In a manner reminiscent of the issues at stake in Terra vermelha, the disputes over land expropriation for mine exploitation are informed by opposing conceptions of the significance of land and of what in the West is defined as ‘nature’. Although this film does not ‘represent’ such epistemic duality as overtly as in Bechis’s (in the pivotal scene in which Nadio eats the soil), it does engage with the geopolitics of extractivism through its paratextual and diegetic handling of the Wirikuta dispute. Reading the film in light of the above-mentioned discursive framing, therefore, the traditional teachings that Nieri receives from the mara’akame (about the pilgrimage, the deer-peyote-maize religious elements, and the function of dreams) can be viewed, not only as a cinematic strategy to convey key aspects of Wixárica ontology and identity (as part of a film about the Wixaritari), but also as the mise-en-scène of a different epistemology within the context of political antagonism (as part, then, of a cinematic project done with the Wixaritari); one that could ultimately lead to a different type of politics or ‘cosmopolitics’, that is, a type of politics informed by an ontological pluralism that does not separate nature and society, and ‘conjure[s] nonhumans as actors in the political arena’.45 This is significant because, as Ángel David Áviles suggests, among the consequences of the Mexican government’s concessions to mine company there is not only the health and territorial issues, but also the exclusion of the Wixaritari from the political decision-making on the development of the desert, and their relegation to the fields of the ritual and symbolic.46 The assembly of the mara’akames and the foregrounding of the Wirikuta as a sacred territory become, then, metaphorical strategies that render the

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real Wixárica practices as oppositional to extractivism and as proposing an alternative politics. From this perspective, the film, like the real dispute surrounding the Wirikuta more generally, invites a rethinking of politics. As Áviles states in relation to the Wixárica fight against extractivism, the acts of resistance carried out by organized communities against mining exploitation in the desert should be thought of as a ‘dissenting political practice that is open not only to other epistemologies, but also to political practices predicated upon other ontological conceptions of the cosmos and hence, those that diverge from Western cosmopolitical practices and conceptions’.47 Bearing this premise in mind, it is clear that although El sueño del mara’akame cannot be viewed as reproducing the axiomatic ‘activism’ of films such as Terra vermelha, it certainly ‘activates’48 the spectator’s emotional and intellectual engagement with the world of the Wixaritari, through a combination of criticality and solidarity. Similarly, since El sueño del mara’akame does not direct spectatorial fruition via pedagogical imperatives as is the case in Bechis’s film, it opens several avenues of enquiry for the viewer, as I hope to have demonstrated, which are discernible through a holistic examination of the film.

Notes 1. http://atlas.inpi.gob.mx/huicholes-estadisticas/. 2. Nolan Warden, Wixárika Music, Huichol Music: The Construction and Commodification of an Indigenous Identity (PhD diss., Univ of California, 2015), available at https://escholarship.org/content/ qt6q82b3hd/qt6q82b3hd.pdf. 3. Judith Romero, ‘Huicholes de Jalisco,’ Proyecto Perfiles Indígenas de México, available at https://www.aacademica.org/salomon.nah mad.sitton/65.pdf. 4. Paul Liffman, ‘The Dream of the Mara’akame: Ethno-fiction, Allochrony, and Indigenous Modenity,’ Encartes 3, No. 5 (2020), w/p, available at https://encartes.mx/en/liffman-sueno-maraak ame-etnoficcion-alocronia/. 5. Paul Stoller, The Cinematic Griot: The Ethnography of Jean Rouch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 143. 6. That is, ‘myth, ritual, dreams, the interpretation of an animate life-world, and perspectives critical of colonization.’ Schiwy, Indianizing Filmi, 9.

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7. Federico Cecchetti, Personal interview with the author. 8. Gleghorn, ‘Filmic Disciples,’ 40. 9. Gleghorn, ‘Filmic Disciples,’ 33. 10. Cecchetti explains, for example, that for him it was very important ‘to learn’. Personal interview with the author. 11. Gleghorn, ‘Filmic Disciples.’ 12. Isabel Seguí, ‘Cine-Testimonio: Saturnino Huillca, estrella del documental revolucionario peruano,’ in Cine documental 13 (2016). 13. Tanja Dreher, ‘Speaking Up or Being Heard? Community Media Interventions and the Politics of Listening,’ Media, Culture and Society 32, No. 1 (2010), 85–103. 14. Tanja Dreher, ‘Speaking Up or Being Heard?,’ 85. 15. Liffmann, ‘The Dream.’ 16. In writing ‘Huichol’ I follow Warden’s differentiation between ‘Huichol music’, which is performed and recorded for commercial uses, and ‘Wixárica music’, which is performed for the Wixaritari. 17. Warden, ‘Wixárika Music,’ 276. 18. Warden, ‘Wixárika Music,’ 284. 19. Warden, ‘Wixárika Music,’ 211. 20. Warden, ‘Wixárika Music,’ 211. 21. Warden, ‘Wixárika Music,’ 236. 22. Hall, ‘Cultural Identity,’ 70. 23. Warden, ‘Wixárika Music,’ 304–364. 24. Wilson, Stewart, Global Indigenous Media, 30. 25. Deloria 2004 quoted in Warden, ‘Wixárika Music,’ 273. 26. Quoted in Juan Poblete, ‘Coloniality and Cinema,’ in The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean (1492–1898), eds., Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Santa Arias (Abington: Routledge, 2021). 27. Harald Prins 2004, quoted in Stewart Wilson, Global Indigenous Media, 3. 28. Schiwy, Indianizing Film, 13. 29. Warden, Wixárika Music, 273. 30. Warden, Wixárika Music, 478. 31. Wilson, Stewart, Global Indigenous Media, 100. 32. Alicia Ivonne Estrada ‘Youtubing Maya Rock B’itzma Sobrevivencia’s Aural Memory of Survival,’ in Indigenous Interfaces, Gómez Menjívar and Chacón, 100.

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33. Estrada, ‘Youtubing Maya Rock,’ 100. 34. Warden, Wixárika Music, 491. 35. Faye Ginsburg, in ‘Rethinking the Digital Age,’ in Global Indigenous Media. 36. Wilson, Stewart, Global Indigenous Media, 3. 37. Falicov, ‘“Cine en Construcción”,’ 254. 38. Camilla Sutherland, Inela Selimovic and Philippa Page, The Feeling Child. Affect and Politics in Latin American Literature and Film (New York and London: Lexington Books, 2018), 5. 39. Vincent Basset, ‘Del turismo al neochamanismo: ejemplo de la reserva natural sagrada de Wirikuta en México,’ Cuicuilco 55 (2012), 245. 40. Basset, ‘Del turismo al neochamanismo,’ 248. 41. Basset, ‘Del turismo al neochamanismo,’ 256. 42. Basset, ‘Del turismo al neochamanismo,’ 254–256. 43. Quoted in Wilson, Stewart, Global Indigenous Media, 96. 44. Joanna Hearne, ‘Indigenous Animation: Educational Programming, Narrative Interventions, and Children’s Cultures,’ in Global Indigenous Media, 96. 45. De la Cadena, ‘Indigenous Cosmopolitics,’ 334. 46. Ángel David Áviles Conesa, Altiplano-Wirikuta: el amanecer amenazado. Megaproyectos mineros y resistencias sociales en el lugar donde nació el sol (PhD diss., Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 2020), 8. 47. Áviles Conesa, ‘Altiplano-Wirikuta,’ 12. 48. Bal, ‘How Can Art.’

CHAPTER 8

The Power of Aesthetics: Retablo (2017), Wiñaypacha (2017), Canción sin nombre (2019)

More than a decade after the making of Madeinusa, things seem to have changed in Peruvian film culture in relation to the visibility of, and (albeit fragile) state support for, films with Indigenous plots. In this last chapter, the analysis of one specific film, widely advertised as Peru’s first film entirely spoken in Aymara, and a number of remarks on other Peruvian recent film productions, will allow me to retrace some of the themes discussed at the beginning of this book. In 2017, Óscar Catacora’s Wiñaypacha (2017), spoken in Aymara, and Álvaro Delgado-Aparicio’s Retablo (2017), spoken in Quechua, won the Ministry of Culture award and the Best Film Award, respectively, at the Lima Film Festival. Two years later, in 2019, another opera prima, Canción sin nombre, by Melina León, also a film with an Indigenous plot, and spoken in Spanish and Quechua, won several awards at the same festival. Those included Best script, Best Actress, the Ministry of Culture

When this book was in the production stage, I received the sad news that Óscar Catacora passed away while shooting his new film. I hope this study shows not only how talented the young filmmaker was, but also the cultural significance of his work in relation to the representation of Indigenous cultures in Peru and Latin America. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. C. D’Argenio, Indigenous Plots in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93914-4_8

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award for Best Peruvian Film, and the Special Jury Prize. The three productions, in particular Retablo and Canción sin nombre, also received a plethora of prizes at international film festivals. Retablo and Wiñaypacha were both domestic box office hits, remaining on Lima’s billboards for several weeks (the release of Canción sin nombre was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic). Wiñaypacha was also well received in the Andean region of Puno, the film’s location, where it enjoyed as many as seven screenings per day in the theatres of the region’s capital thanks to a well-planned promotion campaign on social media. The fact that Wiñaypacha was funded by a funding scheme of the Peruvian Ministry of Culture aimed at financing projects from the Peruvian provinces outside Lima and Callao demonstrates that the still precarious Peruvian industry offers certainly more support than previously to films representing the Indigenous experience.

Regional Narratives and Aesthetization Film critics have linked both Wiñaypacha and Retablo to two important trends of the current Peruvian cinemascape: the revitalization of films in Indigenous languages1 —in fact a pan-Latin American trend, as this book demonstrates—and the cine regional .2 The latter is considered ‘the most important movement in recent Peruvian cinema’3 and consists of films produced and exhibited in the regions outside Lima. Similarly, the films are made by filmmakers who work and live in those same regions, and are produced by formal and informal local companies. That said, the inclusion of Retablo within this trend is indeed questionable since, although shot in Ayacucho and played by mostly Quechua-speaking actors, the film is a Lima-based production; the director is not Andean and does not speak Quechua (he interestingly claimed that he realized how ‘foreign’ he was to the local communities when he went to Ayacucho to speak to them)4 ; the well-known ‘socially committed’ producer Enid Campos, is also based in Lima.5 Wiñaypacha, in contrast, certainly fits within the category of regional cinema given that, in addition to being spoken entirely in Aymara and played by two non-professional Aymara actors, it is a film shot and produced in the Puno highlands. Moreover, it was directed by a filmmaker who identified as Aymara and lived and worked in Puno. Even so, it should also be noted that, the film is, at the same time, ‘global’ in terms of aesthetics and distribution as I shall go on to explain.

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The difference regarding the films’ regional identity might in part explain their dissimilar approaches to Andean indigeneity. Retablo, cowritten by Delgado-Aparicio (who wrote the script at the Sundance Lab) and the renewed Peruvian director and filmmaker Héctor Gálvez, tells the story of a father-son relationship in a remote village of the Peruvian Andes. It was filmed on the outskirts of Ayacucho, a region famous for the production of a sophisticated handcraft genre known as retablo, which dates back to the colonial period and functions as the main axis of the film’s narrative and aesthetics. A retablo literally means an altarpiece, but it is commonly understood to mean a portable wooden tableau designed for private devotion. These generally depict religious, historical or everyday episodes involving figurines made out of dough of ground potato mixed with plaster. The retablo genre is an example of cultural appropriation since its local origins derived from the colonial Cajón de San Marcos, which is a local adaptation of the Capillas de Santeros or portable wooden boxes/altarpieces that were brought to the Americas by the Spanish conquerors and priests to evangelize Andean villages. The modern artistic tradition of the Ayacuchan retablo developed in the 1940s and has produced two types of retablos : testimonial (which focus on social, political, economic situations or events) and costumbrista (which focus on local customs, including religious devotions and festivities). The film’s plot revolves around the master retablista Noé (Amiel Cayo) and his only son Segundo (played by first-time actor Junior Béjar), who is learning his father’s art. Noé and Segundo’s strong bond—supported by the boy’s mother Anatolia (Magaly Solier)—is altered when Segundo finds out about his father’s homosexuality. From then on, the story focuses on the teenager’s coming-of-age, on conflictive notions of masculinity as well as on bullying, homophobia and violence in rural areas. The screenplay was originally in Spanish but, following a suggestion by Solier, the filmmaker decided to shoot in Quechua and worked with an interpreter on the set. Retablo’s story regarding homophobia is significant since it makes visible a subject that, according to the filmmaker, is still taboo throughout the country. The 2019 Annual Report of the Periodical Risk, Intelligence and Security Monitor (PRISM) has worryingly indicated that Peru represents a ‘moderate threat’ for the LGBTI community, having a social acceptance of LGBTI individuals that oscillates between intolerance and mixed-tolerance.6 Furthermore, the film also challenges patriarchal codes of masculinity grounded in violence. Regarding the subject of indigeneity, however, it is difficult to avoid perceiving what Mónica Delgado has

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called the ‘Madeinusa effect’, in reference to the film’s display of ‘A sierra for export, with marvellous landscapes, but where coexistence is impossible’ and the artificial recreation of Andean life and traditions for the Western gaze.7 Furthermore, placing a story of homophobia in a remote Andean village inevitably frames the issues of gender discrimination and of violence towards LGBTQ+ as a regional, and not a national, problem. Regardless of the filmmaker’s intentions, the film displays rural Quechuaspeaking culture as the epitome of the country’s machista conservatism, a perspective that, according to Ubilluz Raygada, informs a discursive tradition that ranges from indigenista anthropology to the infamous Uchuraccay report and eventually films like Madeinusa.8 In that sense, the film does little to unsettle the dominant racist perspectives in a country where the term ‘serrano’ [from the highlands] is still synonymous with ‘Indian’ and hence, a term frequently used as an insult.9 Even the much praised aesthetics of tableaux vivants and frontal shots enclosing the characters in the frame in order to reproduce the aesthetics of the retablo, might be a controversial choice when examined in relation to the Indigenous plot of violence and homophobia. As Beteta points out, the careful and skilful image composition emphasizes the stasis of Andean cultural practices and aestheticizes violence.10 Furthermore, as an artistic visual form, the retablo is a representation to be looked at, thus the Indigenous figures inhabiting it are gazed upon (by the director and the spectator), and even judged, but without being granted the opportunity to reciprocate that gaze or self-represent (Fig. 8.1). By contrast, Wiñaypacha seems to be more innovative in terms of its discourse of Andean indigeneity. Interestingly, it is precisely the film aesthetics that allow Catacora to overcome the shortcomings of previous representations. In what follows, I assess how aesthetically and culturally innovative Wiñaypacha is, particularly in relation to its portrayal of Aymara Indigenous populations. In order to discuss this, I situate Wiñaypacha within both a local and global context by first analysing how the film dialogues with Peruvian cinematic indigenismo; and, secondly, how it engages with the global trend of ‘slow cinema’. I suggest that Wiñaypacha overcomes indigenista binaries and conventions through a focus on intimacy, and that its dilated temporality is the element through which the film engages with Aymara indigeneity and expresses its political dimension. At the end of this chapter, I briefly examine Canción sin nombre

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Fig. 8.1 Segundo and his father Noé working at one of their creations. Still from Retablo

to suggest that both Catacora and León have explored fertile new cinematic avenues (in terms of production, aesthetics, and representation) for screening the Indigenous experience.

Andean Indigenous Representation Beyond Folklore and Authenticity The success of Wiñaypacha seems to lie both in its cinematic qualities and its cultural significance. Critics have highlighted the film’s innovative aesthetics and a contemplative style that recalls certain traditions of Japanese cinema and Italian neorealism. Its ‘uniqueness’ also derives from the way in which it approaches the Andean world: according to Delgado, Wiñaypacha begins a new chapter in the representation of Andean culture in Peruvian cinema.11 Like the other films analysed in this book, Wiñaypacha focuses on Indigenous culture and foregrounds real Indigenous languages, employs an aesthetics that dialogues with global trends and deals with the political in a less overt way than so-called ‘political cinema’. However, unlike the other directors, Catacora identified as Aymara and, as far as we understand from his interviews, he knew the culture he represented very well, having spent his childhood partly in the company of

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his Aymara grandparents. In my analysis of Llosa’s films, I argued that one of their shortcomings was their controversial representation of Peru’s ethnically heterogeneous society. While critics such as Pagán-Teitelbaum and Vich have associated such problematic depiction with a false ethnography and with the aestheticization and commodification of choledad, respectively, as I have I maintained that the films’ representation of the Andean world was rooted in Peruvian indigenista and proto-indigenista literary and visual discourses of the Andean world.12 I now wish to return to the concept of indigenismo to explore the claim made by Catacora that indigenista works were a key source of inspiration and argue that a comparison with previous indigenista films demonstrates the innovative extent of Wiñaypacha’s representation of Aymara culture. While, as I previously explained, indigenismo was a major trend in Peruvian arts in the first half of the twentieth century, Peruvian cinema has not embraced indigenismo as a major trend to the same extent. It was not until the late 1950s when a group of Cuzqueño intellectuals and professionals (among them, Manuel and Víctor Chambi, Eulogio Nishiyama and Luis Figueroa) used cinema to vindicate Andean culture and investigate local Indigenous traditions after inaugurating the short-lived Cine Club Cuzco in 1955. According to Bedoya, their films ‘showed for the first time in Peruvian cinema the presence of the Andes and its inhabitants’ while developing a stable filmmaking activity outside of Lima.13 Like the early twentieth-century indigenista artists and intellectuals, the filmmakers were (mostly) non-Indigenous middle-class intellectuals and professionals that sought to represent an Andean Indigenous rural culture to which they did not belong.14 Majluf employs the term ‘paradoxical’ to refer to the indigenista artists’ appropriation of the ‘Indian’ because they ‘presented the Indian as the paradigm of the authentic nationality, as the origin […] of the national culture, while admitting that they were not part of that collectivity’.15 These filmmakers mainly shot documentaries of regional folklore and produced films that merged the fictional and factual, such as Kukuli (1961), which combines the fictionalization of a Quechua mythological tale with documentary scenes of local folklore. Indeed, it is worth noting that the director of Wiñaypacha claims to have been inspired precisely by Kukuli as well as by indigenista literature and by the photography of Martín Chambi (who, as previously mentioned, was associated with indigenismo, and the father of Manuel and Víctor Chambi). Yet, at the same time, Wiñaypacha offers a portrayal of the Andes that overcomes indigenista conventions. This is not simply because Catacora

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identified as Aymara and, therefore, his work is not ‘heterogenous’ in the sense of Cornejo Polar’s term, but also because his film does not enact binaries and tropes that have characterized both the indigenista works and the mainstream notions of ‘indios ’ and ‘serranos ’ in Peru. Instead, Wiñaypacha highlights the individual traits of Indigenous people, and poses the ‘Indian problem’, to use José Carlos Mariátegui’s famous expression,16 in new terms: not as a local socio-economic problem, but as a global issue concerning ageing, rural life and those lives at the fringes of capitalism. Wiñaypacha was shot on location at the foot of the Allincapac mountain (an ‘Apu’ [sacred mountain and mountain spirit] for Quechua and Aymara Indigenous populations) in the Macusani district, in what the director has described as challenging conditions due to the cold temperatures and the elevated height of more than 5000 metres above sea level. The shooting was preceded by extensive preparation for the acting of the two non-professional Aymara actors: Rosa Nina (who had never seen a film before) and the director’s own grandfather, Vicente Catacora. They play the peasants Phaxsi and Willka, the only human subjects that appear on the screen. The film tells the story of this elderly peasant couple, who live in their small chacra [farm], a typical Aymara dwelling with a few animals, in a very remote and isolated area of the Peruvian highlands. In true neorealist fashion, Catacora employs a still camera to portray the daily life of ‘quotidian microevents’ experienced by the couple: threshing, making potato starch, knitting ponchos, chewing coca leaves, performing rituals and religious ceremonies. The dialogue is spoken entirely in Aymara and there is no diegetic or extra-diegetic music; the sounds of nature are the only soundtrack. Because of their age and loneliness as well as the rigidity of the puna, they are portrayed as vulnerable, a condition epitomized by the fire that destroys their house and eventually causes Willka’s death. Left alone, Phaxsi decides to leave; in the final sequence, she walks towards the mountain in a symbolic act of re-joining nature. While Nina and Catacora are the only actors, there are two more characters in this film. One is Antuku, the couple’s absent son, whom they repeatedly and nostalgically mention. The other is the landscape of the Peruvian Andean highlands, which fill most of the images in order to visually articulate the important role of nature in Aymara culture and the notion of the earth as a living being. The central significance of this landscape is established early on through dialogue and cinematography. The first image is a still frame of Andean landscape, with the sacred mountain in the background. Cut

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to another still frame: a long shot of the house, establishing a precise hierarchy and a bond between the human subjects and the natural environment. We are then introduced to the couple. There is a still frame of a medium shot of the house; we hear the off-screen voice of Willka calling his wife, who subsequently appears in the doorway, walking slowly, aided by a stick, and crossing the threshold to make her way outside. Then we see the two of them performing a ritual to the Pachamama [mother earth] to invoke fertility in the fields. The trope of the absent child is also articulated in the first minutes as the couple mentions that their son has emigrated to the city and left them all alone; now old and tired, they wait for his return. These initial scenes recall the beginning of Kukuli. That film starts with a set of still (albeit shaky) frames of the Andean highlands, after which we see a small isolated choza [hut] and an Indigenous man calling his granddaughter Kukuli (played by Figueroa’s sister, the mestizo Judith Figueroa). However, the differences are also soon evident. While Wiñaypacha does not offer any visual, sound or narrative element that functions as a bridge between Aymara and non-Aymara culture, Kukuli mediates the representation of Quechua Andean culture through a masculine authoritative voice-over that reads a text (written by the intellectual Sebastián Salazar Bondy) which introduces and explains, in a formal and literary Spanish rich in metaphors, what the spectator sees. The choza is presented as ‘a drop of life amidst solitude’ and the two elderly characters as Inca descendants who chew ‘the coca of patience’. Kukuli herself is idealized through images and text; she lives in close contact with nature (surrounded by vegetation, she bathes in the river and speaks to a llama) while being described as an archetype: as an ‘eternal woman, immobile at the origin of love and life’ with a ‘native grace’. As the film progresses, the voice-over comments on Andean material culture (dress, masks, chulpas [Aymara funerary towers]), rituals (coca chewing, chicha [corn drink] drinking), possessions (sheep and llamas), and public forms of expression (dances, carnival). This narration constructs a typified Andean collective identity which encompasses both the ‘melancholic Indian’ and the ‘festive Indian’, two stereotypes that, according to Marisol De la Cadena, were elaborated by indigenista discourse.17 Critics have contrasted Wiñaypacha to Kukuli arguing that the former, unlike the latter, does not present the pitfalls of indigenismo. For Bustamante, Kukuli ‘vindicates Indigenous culture from the perspective of

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Andean urban intellectuals and artists who wanted to assume a hegemonic role within a specific idea of nation’, while Wiñaypacha ‘is the film of the sons and nephews of those whom indigenismo aimed to represent’.18 According to Delgado, the key issue lies in the films’ portrayal of Indigenous ‘symbolic and cosmogonic imaginaries’; in contrast to Kukuli which uses a ‘documentary way of filming’ to produce a ‘reductionist’ approach, Wiñaypacha manages to merge myth, realism and fiction by incorporating ‘symbolisms, analogies or mythical aspects’ within the documentary style, but without affecting the level of realism of the on-screen representation.19 The issue highlighted by Delgado is indeed a crucial element in both films. Expanding on her reading, my analysis centres on the very different ways in which the two films deal with documentary and folklore in order to represent Andean identity. In Kukuli, the young female protagonist embarks on a journey of ‘coming of age and discovery of the cultural environment’20 : the story starts when Kukuli leaves her grandparents to participate in the celebrations of the Mamacha Carmen/Virgen del Carmen at Paucartambo, a village in the Cuzco region. On her journey, she falls in love with a man (Alaku) and goes to Paucartambo with him. Here, Kukuli is seen by an ‘Ukuko’, a mythological figure half man and half bear, who takes her away and kills her, but who is subsequently killed by the villagers, under the guidance of the local priest. In fact, the Ukuko is seen as a (Indigenous) diabolic being whose presence is caused by human sins. The film ends with the images of two llamas named Kukuli and Alaku, presented as the reincarnation of the young couple finally reunited. In line with early indigenista representational matters, Kukuli employs a regional allegory which posits the young, innocent, naïve and victimized Kukuli as representative of Andean women, if not of the Andean population. It also offers a compelling reflection of uneven power dynamics through the character of the priest leading the peasants’ revolt. These patterns, alongside the politics of casting, seem to undermine other important strategies that seek to produce a transcultural film: the use of local myths, Quechua language and the shooting of regional folklore. The invocation of local folklore, that is, ‘the stories, songs, customs, rituals and proverbs which shaped the collective spirit of a particular ‘people’ is particularly relevant. In Latin America, folklore has been both ‘a kind of bank where authenticity is safely stored’ and ‘a way of referring to contemporary cultures which articulate alternatives to existing power

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structures’.21 In Kukuli both functions apply, although the film seems to focus more on the former than on the latter, like many indigenista works which were defined by the ‘discourse of authenticity emerging from romantic nationalism’.22 In addition, while indigenista ‘folkorization’— that is, the process whereby ‘public forms of expression are selected as being representative of a whole region or nation and are staged and promoted as such’23 —has proved ‘essential to the promotion of […] identities’ in Latin America24 and became a site of interaction between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous subjects; in Kukuli, the representation of folklore, combined with the idealized and archetypical portrayal of femininity and indigeneity, essentializes Andean culture through the notion of authenticity and by minimizing the differences between local communities. These features are clearly articulated in Andean folklore specialist Efraín Morote Best’s (1921–1989) on-screen prologue: Kukuli is described as transmitting ‘the human message of a millenary people’ through its ‘[p]resentation of types and attitudes, dances and landscapes, celebrations and customs, rituals and beliefs’ and in such a way that the spectator is left with the feeling of having been close to ‘a different, profound and authentic Peru’. Wiñaypacha instead privileges the formation of individual over collective identities: rather than public forms of expressions, stories, songs, customs and rituals are presented as cultural practices shaping the private and daily life of Phaxsi and Willka and hence, markers of their identity. At the beginning, the couple carries out religious ceremonies where they drink and dance; later on, Willka plays the Andean flute. Throughout the film, they perform different rituals (to invoke fertility, to celebrate the New Year) and carry out rural and artisanal labour (the knitting of ponchos). Through the couple’s activities, the film represents the features of Aymara culture: the cult of agriculture and death is reflected in rural labour, rituals and the apachetas rock piles; the bond of Aymara populations to their territory is represented by the Apus, the rituals to the pachamama and the couple’s conception of humanized animals and earth beings. The film also refers to Aymara religion and symbolism through the characters’ names: Willka means Sun and Phaxsi means Moon, while Antuku means ‘Star that no longer shines’. However, the emphasis is on representing Phaxsi and Willka simply as individuals confronted by ageing and solitude, who talk about their daily chores, past shared experiences and their own relationship. The film thus constructs the subjectivities of these elderly people, shaped by their Indigenous Aymara culture, but

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not essentialized as allegories of a homogenous Aymara identity. Documentary qualities are far from being absent, but rather than use an ethnographic observational approach that focuses on collective folklore, as in the case of Kukuli, they derive from a neorealist style that focuses on intimacy and on acts of ‘speaking in a low tone, suitable to confidences’25 ; this is primarily achieved through mise-en-scène, casting, lighting and an emphasis on still frames as well as medium/long shots over close-ups. Two further elements that overcome the limitations of an indigenista aesthetic are the absence of the binary of ‘coast vs sierra’ and the characterization of the Andean subject. In Peru, the construction of the modern state was traditionally accompanied by a racialization of geography whereby the coast and Lima, the capital, were associated with modernity and progress, and the Andes with the rural and backwardness.26 The binary coast-Andes perception informs both early indigenista works and the ever-persistent derogatory notion of ‘serrano’. As we have seen, from late-nineteenth-century novels such as Aves sin nido to recent film productions such as Madeinusa, the parallel urban–rural binary node has proved to be an enduring rhetorical strategy especially when combined with the representation of an external gaze through the character of a foreigner who arrives in the Andes. By focusing solely on the Aymara couple and eliminating the presence (on and off screen) of the capital Lima, Wiñaypacha manages to undermine the power hierarchies associated with the coast-sierra dichotomy. For instance, although it is revealed that Antuku has emigrated to the city, the latter is never seen on-screen and is not named. Hence, the film does not impose a univocal way of reading Phaxsi and Willka’s reality on the spectator. By eliminating such a charged point of comparison (the modern capital Lima), the film avoids the notion of ‘backwardness’ and of an Andean racialized geography, both so crucial in colonialist and Eurocentric constructions of identity in Peru.27 That said, critics such as Beteta interpret the absence of an on-screen encounter between the West and non-West as a limitation. According to this view, Wiñaypacha fails in its declared intention of promoting interculturality since the presence of multiculturalism and cultural hybridity is reduced.28 Yet, I would suggest that, on the contrary, this is one of the ways in which the film problematizes the very notion of a Eurocentrically defined Other. Wiñaypacha also manages to eschew the dominant stereotype of the ‘melancholic Indian’, which has been both a rhetorical strategy of domination29 in Peruvian cultural history and a feature of the ideal Indian

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created by the indigenistas. Whether linked to an alleged Indian nature prone to subjugation or to the Indigenous populations’ unjust history of dispossession, melancholy was conceived as a trait of an essentialized Indianness. Chambi’s well-known Tristeza andina (1933) articulates this notion visually (and textually, through the title). While the photography of Wiñaypacha partly draws on the indigenista sublime and/or bucolic imagery of the Andean territory represented in images such as Tristeza andina, the film does not express the meanings historically associated with such imagery and especially the notion of Indian melancholy. The film’s overall ‘melancholic’ mood is not linked to an essentialized Aymara identity, then, but rather to the conditions of isolation and abandonment experienced by Phaxsi and Willka. Furthermore, at times the characters themselves appear to supersede the trope of the melancholic Indian; notwithstanding the austerity and the tragic events they face, Willka persists in encouraging his wife optimistically, telling her that they will find a solution to their difficulties.

Slowness, Indigeneity and the Political Wiñaypacha’s title has been translated into English as Eternity. According to the director, the translation does not render the precise meaning of the Aymara word, which would be better understood as tiempo eterno [eternal time], an expression that evokes the Aymara conception of the cyclical nature of time. Despite its limitations, however, the translation does retain an important notion of the original Aymara, namely, that of an ‘extended’ time, of an ‘infinite’ temporality, which can be thought of as a disruption of, or at least a departure from, dominant Western notions of linear temporalities and the hegemonic narratives of progress associated with them. The title (and its translation) foregrounds the dominant temporal mood of the film, one of a ‘dilated’ temporality, of lengthy duration and waiting. This is achieved both formally and thematically. Formally, still frames are used exclusively thus dispensing with camera movement; the mise-en-scène is simple and dominated by a natural environment where the slow pace is evoked by the micromovements of clouds across the sky, the gentle currents in the streams and brooks, the vegetation quivering in the wind; the little emotional expressivity and the minimal movements of the actors who spend a lot of time seated, observing, carrying out small and repetitive actions, seldom saying a word and then prolonging

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Fig. 8.2 Phaxsi and Willka in a still from Wiñaypacha

the enunciation of each utterance. All this contributes to this slow or extended temporality (Fig. 8.2). In terms of narrative, ‘little’ happens and ‘little’ is said; the spectator’s own perception of temporality is confronted with an uneventful tranquillity for a large part of the film. This temporal feature of the film is also shaped by the sense of waiting and cyclical elements, both of which are articulated through the trope of the absent child. Throughout the film the couple allude to Antuku. This trope has in fact several functions: to construct the film’s temporality; to show the protagonists’ vulnerability; to allow the staging of premonitory dreams presented as a feature of their Indigenous identity; and to articulate the key theme of the film, namely, the abandonment of the rural areas by young generations while also alluding to the complexities of the process of deculturation and acculturation when Phaxsi reveals that the migrant Antuku felt ashamed by his Aymara language. The aesthetics of slowness might lead one to argue that Wiñaypacha reinforces old tropes of indigeneity such as the ‘binaries erected between the local and the global, stasis and movement, and dwelling and migration’.30 However, I would instead propose that not only does Wiñaypacha eschew old binaries, but that its aesthetics of slowness and its temporality are in fact the elements whereby the film engages with Aymara indigeneity and expresses its political dimension. In Aymara culture, past and future are not sequential. As Javer Lajo explains, ‘Time, in our culture, is not symbolically represented as an “arrow”, as it is in the West, but rather, as a zig-zag, like a “thunderbolt” or the “trace of the

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serpent”; […] time flows from the inside to the outside and returns from the outside to the inside, in permanent cycles’.31 In the ‘Wiñaya Pacha’ or ‘eternal time’, Lajo states ‘one unfolds “forward” but also “backwards”, “externally”, but also “internally”’.32 This affects the conception of the cycle of life: ‘For the Aymara, life is conceived of as eternal in the Pacha (universe)’, death is not the end, but the ‘continuation’ of life, a ‘pasaje-viaje’ [passage-journey] after which one returns to the real life33 ; moreover, unlike Western thought, in Aymara culture and language, space and time are not two separate entities: in Quechua and Aymara languages, one word—pacha—designates both space and time.34 The type of temporality of Wiñaypacha is not dissimilar from the temporality of the cinematic trend called ‘slow cinema’. Slow films are, according to Matthew Flanagan, characterized by ‘the employment of (often extremely) long takes, de-centred and understated modes of storytelling, and a pronounced emphasis on quietude and the everyday’.35 Other characteristics include ‘silence’ and ‘stillness’ as well as ‘static camerawork’, an ‘attention to narratively insignificant incidents’ and ‘settings devoid of human presence present’.36 Wiñaypacha’s use of a still camera and contemplative landscape imagery, reduced dialogue and action, repetitions and waiting fit well with such a genre. Catacora himself has declared in interviews that his style is indebted to the cinema of Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu, the latter being a key representative of slow cinema. The relevance of this linkage, however, does not lie in the shared stylistic aspects, but rather in the political implications of slowness on-screen. This is a contested notion. Several film theorists argue that slow films are political because, through their focus on alternative temporalities, inverted speeds and the realities and lives of the marginalized, they question mainstream narrative forms and interrogate ‘well-established notions of aesthetic and cultural worthiness - what is worthy of being shown, for how long it is worth being shown’.37 Furthermore, according to Karl Schoonover, slow films’ emphasis on wasted time and ‘uneconomical temporalities’ interrogates capitalism and what ‘counts as productive labor’.38 Similarly, in her analysis of Hamaca Paraguaya, Eva K. Romero argues that film slowness may be a ‘site for resistance’.39 Nevertheless, other critics underscore the fact that slow films in fact idealize pre-industrial and rural lifestyles often avoiding engaging with the complexities of contemporaneity.40

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Considering what I have argued so far, Wiñaypacha’s slowness can be interpreted as a site of resistance since it foregrounds a notion of Indigenous temporality different from, and opposed to, the dominant Western one, and crafts an idea of Aymara indigeneity. The film’s temporality also brings into question the notions and values of labour, productivity, progress and capitalism. Like other slow films, Wiñaypacha’s time does not correspond to the time of capitalism which is ‘produced, measured and controlled by and through productivity and labor’.41 Phaxsi and Willka’s agrarian labour is pre-industrial and pre-capitalist; theirs is a traditional subsistence agriculture whose time is regulated by nature and natural forces (an example is the wind needed for the threshing). The film, however, does more than question the hegemony of capitalist productivity or foreground ecological time and ‘more conscientious environmental stewards’42 ; moreover, it neither idealizes the pre-industrial as a lost Eden, nor overlooks current issues. Instead, Wiñaypacha exposes the situation of a contemporary Peru in which there are isolated places where ‘other’ marginal lifestyles and labours exist, while simultaneously posing the problem of the current abandonment of rural areas and consequent situation of vulnerable ageing subjects. Phaxsi and Willka’s bodies are becoming less and less productive because of the passing of time. They are old and tired, as emphasized in a medium close-up of the couple seated next to each other, resting and chewing coca leaves and looking at the horizon. Their dialogues underline their increasing difficulties: when Willka asks his wife to knit a new poncho for him, she replies that she is too old and hardly sees; Willka often complains of feeling tired; they both voice their need of their son. Unlike in mainstream Hollywood productions, in Wiñaypacha onscreen labour does not serve an action-driven plot; rather, it is the site of social and political critique. The characters’ bodies, their slowness and slow labour are sites of resistance against dominant economic systems and against the passing of time. Here too, then, slowness has a political dimension. Wiñaypacha seems to ask the spectator to reflect on how elderly peasants can survive in a society driven by capitalism and progress in which their aides are either abandoning them (their family) or nonexistent (state). This political dimension is not radical since it does not question the validity of the Western notion of nation-state and citizenship; nevertheless, it is innovative for several reasons. First, Peruvian cinema has explored at length the process of migration to the cities but not the consequences of this process for the rural areas. Second, it further differentiates

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Wiñaypacha from the previous Peruvian films commented on above: here, the problem is no longer that of forging an idea of authentic nationhood rooted in Indigenous culture, such as in the indigenista works, or of striving to interpret the ethnic heterogeneity of Peru, as in the case of Llosa’s films; rather, the problem is one of citizenship rights, abandonment of the elderly, state support for and recognition of rural populations who are not visible at the centre of the political debate and, therefore, of ‘cultural worthiness’. Therefore, the film seems to suggest that today’s ‘Indian problem’ is not merely socio-economic, as proposed in Mariátegui’s seminal essay (to which I alluded earlier); nor simply a local issue (bounded to the history and realities of Indigenous ethnicities and the nation-state); it is also a global one affecting broader categories, namely peasants, the elderly, and the rural communities living at the margins of capitalism who are witnessing the abandonment of their lands, and lifestyles, by younger generations. Within the context of Peruvian and Latin American filmic representations, this film manages to eschew if not undermine persistent colonialist tropes regarding Andean Indigenous subjects and, notwithstanding the limitations of its political proposal, it does offer, within the realm of the symbolic, novel ways of thinking about contemporary Andean cultures.

Intermediality and Cultural Intimacy Delgado’s claim that Wiñaypacha begins a new chapter in the representation of the Andean world in Peruvian cinema could be applied also to León’s Canción sin nombre, a film on Peruvians’ lived experience of the armed conflict and on disenfranchised and displaced Indigenous migrants. In this last section, I focus on how León’s debut work unsettles colonialist representational regimes of indigeneity and, by means of intermedial aesthetics, affective engagement with the spectator and cultural intimacy as a production strategy, does profitable cultural and political work. For, there is no doubt that the film has created spaces for debate on Peruvian dominant narratives of race and the internal conflict. At the same time, I suggest that Canción sin nombre offers an example of the impact that ethical approaches to filmmaking can have on the ‘real’ lives and social commitment of individuals. Set in 1988, at the height of the internal war, the film tells the story of Georgina (Pamela Mendoza), a young pregnant Andean woman who lives with her husband Leo (Lucio Rojas) in a hut on the fringes of

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both the capital and its peripheral settlements, a distance epitomized by the extreme long shots of the couple slowly climbing the deserted hill surrounding their house to reach the market where they work. Georgina gives birth in what turns out to be a fake clinic; her baby is stolen and her quest to find her daughter leads her to Pedro (Tommy Párraga), a reporter (himself a ‘marginal’ due to his homosexuality) whose investigation takes him from Lima to Iquitos to uncover a web of child trafficking supported by institutions and local powers. Co-written by León and Michael J. White, the screenplay is based on a real story of child smuggling investigated in the early 1980s by León’s father, the reporter and co-founder of La República newspaper Ismael León. The filmmaker decided to set the story at the end of that decade to be able to dovetail with the armed conflict which in 1981 had only just started, and to transpose the experience of the war she remembered from her childhood to the cinema screen. The story avoids stereotypes and commonplaces about both the Andean populations and the war. In terms of plot and mise-en-scène, the migrants are depicted as part of a joyful community that shows cultural resistance by maintaining their traditions even in extremely precarious living and working conditions, as shown in the initial sequence of the Andean danza de tijeras [dance of scissors]. They are not portrayed as individuals lacking ‘knowledge’ or ‘civilization’, but as lacking support from state institutions. It is this lack of faith in the state which motivates Georgina’s choice to give birth at the private clinic advertised on the radio. Georgina is represented as a victim of an unjust social and political system; however, her sense of victimhood as an abandoned young mother does not lead to silence, but rather to agency and resilience: she goes back to the clinic to demand her baby back, she goes to the police, the courthouse and, eventually, the newspapers; she also forms an alliance with other mothers whose babies were stolen. The choice of Pedro’s homosexuality is a further strategy whereby the film challenges dominant imaginaries; as León has explained in an interview, such a choice allowed her to avoid the patriarchal saviour-saved narrative while it also establishes an alliance between two characters who both suffer discrimination.43 León’s comment shows that the need to make an ‘honest’ representation and avoid stereotyped characterizations of the Andean world was a clear objective of all the crew working on the film. A further example comes from the music composer, the renowned Pauchi Sasaki. Sasaki explained that in order to allow the viewer to experience the Indigenous story in a

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non-hierarchical way, she avoided ‘imposing’ a narrative structure through music, and combined different instruments such as the Andean charango and the violin with electronic music. Moreover, she decided to play the Andean instrument herself in order to express vulnerability through music given her own lack of expertise in playing it.44 While Pedro and Georgina are both represented as victims, the film’s plot does not conflate the different experiences of the war and emphasizes how the latter was experienced in radically diverse ways by those who were abandoned or marginalized, and even threatened, by institutions and those who were not. The presence of the conflict and the political context is, at the same time, diluted and pervasive: it is announced in the pretitle sequence, by means of a montage of archival footage and newspaper articles chronicling terrorist attacks, explosions, protests and economic inflation; it is shown in specific moments, such as when Pedro covers the news of assassinations in the Ayacucho region or when Leo joins the Shining Path forces and sets up a bomb attack; but it is also present in the background through the news that we hear acousmatically in Pedro’s house and office via television or the radio, and through the blackouts, the curfew, and the ever-present threatening police (Fig. 8.3). Like Retablo and Wiñaypacha, Canción sin nombre places great emphasis on aesthetics and visuality. The film is shot in black and white

Fig. 8.3 Georgina during her daily commute in a still from Canción sin nombre

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with the 4:3 screen ratio typical of the television of the period. Inti Briones’s cinematography is characterized by carefully composed images, and a minimalist, shadowy ambience which complements the narrative and the Kafkaesque quests faced by Pedro and Georgina; it evokes Georgina and Leo’s disenfranchisement by ‘silhouetting [their] daily, mountainous commute in long shot, like storm-blown frames of shadow theatre’45 or their powerlessness through high angles or long shots that reduce their size before the imposing government buildings. The cinematography adds a self-conscious layer to the neorealist mise-en-scène; nevertheless, the sophisticated aesthetics of Canción sin nombre does not lead to an aestheticization of the violence or the trauma; instead, its power lies in creating a conceptual as well as affective engagement with the viewer, who ‘feels’ the pain of Georgina and at the same time is made aware of how institutional failings had contributed to her plight. Regarding the former, the use of analogue media plays a key role. The filmmaker has explained that the choice of black and white and the television format are a way of transporting the spectator to the period in which the story is set; however, I would contend that their effect is more telling Through the screen format, the monochrome, the initial montage and the constant presence of television and, especially radio broadcasts, the media are implicitly presented as investigative tools of the present and as mediators of historical discourse. The protagonism of the media links the elegiac tone of the black and white less to individual nostalgia and more to a sense of a shared past. Furthermore, the media perspective (combined with the story of a personal quest and a journalistic investigation) invites the viewer to problematize official discourses and notions of truth as well as to look critically at all institutions, including newspapers. Such a critical perspective towards concealed truths and official narratives as well as towards institutions, is reinforced by the lack of final resolution that leaves the viewers with more questions than answers. Despite Pedro’s uncovering of the child smuggling web and the complicity of the justice system, Georgina will not find her daughter, and her lullaby will be sung to a daughter without a name. Pedro, on the other hand, will not be able to have a relationship with his partner because of death threats. On the other hand, the film exploits the ‘affective possibilities’ of cinema by, on the one hand, ‘touching’ the spectator through the unjust suffering of Georgina and, on the other, fictionalizing affective alliances: in addition to that between Pedro and Georgina, there is the relationship of solidarity between Georgina and a women’s association, as well as with

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other women victims of child abduction, and her friends who support her at the risk of being arrested. More germane to this study, however, is the fact that the notion of affective alliance is articulated at the level of the film’s production. The latter can be understood as an experience of ‘cultural intimacy’, a notion employed by María Eugenia Elfe in relation to the work of the Ayacuchan director Palito Ortega Matute. Elfe’s cultural intimacy signals a ‘domestic and artisanal mode of production that is characteristic of regional films in Peru’ which consists of establishing close connection between the filmmaker and local audience through the involvement of ‘relatives, close friends, local community members, and local authorities in the making of films’.46 Although the production of Canción sin nombre did not involve such familial network in a regional context, it did generate a ‘sense of closeness’ between the people working on the film, since they ended up forming a ‘close bond through the making of a film that is based on shared experiences of a highly sensitive nature’47 ; the fact that the film was a low budget production also contributed to the sense of closeness. León made the casting in Villa El Salvador, one of Lima municipalities which was originally a settlement occupied by Andean migrant in the early 1970s and then evolved into a well organized urban zone which has become well-known for its inclusive city policy, effective community mobilization as well as support to the arts.48 The filmmaker went to the local theatre Arena y esteras where she was put in touch with Mendoza, who had worked with the renowned theatre group Cuatrotablas, one of the first groups to introduce Andean themes into Lima’s theatre in the 1970s and part of the so-called New Peruvian Theatre. Canción sin nombre was Mendoza’s cinematic debut. In contrast, Párraga, who had already appeared in a short film by León, was a theatre actor and TV acting coach. The encounter with the cast evolved into a process of sharing the experiences and memories that each one, and their families, had of the conflict; Mendoza’s mother, for example, had left Ayacucho when she was fourteen because of the war. It was also a process of forming new friendships, which continued after the film’s release. Párraga, for example, invited the filmmaker to organize a workshop at his institution. The conversation between the cast and crew informed the script as did the improvisations of the actors, while Párraga confirms that the five-week shooting was preceded by a year of rehearsals. These were conducted without a script, improvising on the main themes tackled in each scene. The actors’ improvisations informed the final screenplay

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that, once rewritten, was used during the shooting. As in other films commented in the book, the actors contributed the rewriting of some scenes; for example, Lidia Quispe suggested the scene of the Pachatinka, the celebration and blessing of the traje de tijeras [scissors’ dress]. In this same respect, León has hence described scriptwriting as a collaborative practice: Rather than writing a script from real life, this film has tried to listen. In other words, if the script is certainly based on real events, it is in the sense that it comes from something that actually happened but that was then transformed by my own experience and imagination. But the script also became inseparable from life itself from the very beginning of the casting process because the actors themselves started to transform the script, to fill it with their own life experiences, their own ideas, and whatever occurred to them at the time.49

The making of Canción sin nombre had a real impact on the lives of both the filmmaker and the actors, confirming the importance of examining the ‘realism’ of films’ modes of production, as Nagib suggests. This is particularly evident in the case of Mendoza. At the Cannes film festival where the film premiered, Mendoza explained that her origins and her family were just like those of the protagonist. The story of Georgina is the story of her mother, her neighbours, her friends and the many women activists of Villa El Salvador whom she defines as ‘representatives of sorrow, but also of resistance’. Like Georgina, the women of her community had ‘no time for the sorrow, only to fight, […] and rebel’.50 The film has been for her a rediscovery of her origins and of her mother’s native language. As a result, Mendoza decided to go to the Andean village of Puquio with her mother, where they remembered painful memories. She also learned Quechua, a language that her mother did not teach her to promote her child’s acculturation. In fact, Mendoza explains that one of the challenges of interpreting Georgina was the rediscovery of the language and the sound of the language that as a child she was forbidden from learning. Finally, Canción sin nombre is an example of how ethical approaches to filmmaking and social issue films can result in real social commitment. León, for example, has founded the association Te busco [I look for you], to find children stolen or adopted in Peru. Mendoza is part of a movement of revitalization of the Quechua language. Going back to

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the power of the image evoked at the beginning of this book, Mendoza has explained that the film has also impacted the lives of those who live in marginalized areas and have watched it or know that she acted in it. She has told, for example, of children and neighbours who have asked her how she got to act in the film. As the actress eloquently says, for those young people, the film has ‘opened the imagination to imagine a possible life’.51

Notes 1. Quoted in Óscar García, ‘Wiñaypacha: primera película en aymara gana premios en México,’ El Comercio [online] March 16, 2018, available at https://elcomercio.pe/somos/winaypacha-pri mera-pelicula-aymara-noticia-451374. 2. Juan José Beteta, ‘Wiñaypacha marca un hito en el cine peruano,’ Cine Encuentro [online] April 20, 2018, available at https://www.cinencuentro.com/2018/04/22/critica-win aypacha-marca-un-hito-en-el-cine-peruano/. 3. Emilio Bustamante and Jaime Luna Victoria, Las miradas múltiples. El cine regional peruano Lima (Lima: Fondo editorial Universidad de Lima, 2017), 21. 4. Delgado-Aparicio is a graduate from the London School of Economics who holds a dual British and Peruvian nationality (which allowed Retablo to be nominated for the 2020 BAFTA award in the category of ‘Outstanding debut by a British writer, director or producer’). After screening his short film El acompañante/The Companion at Sundance in the early 2000s, he was invited by Robert Redford to apply for a place at the Sundance Lab to develop that script for a feature-length film. 5. Sarah Barrow, ‘Negotiating Neoliberal Demands on Contemporary Cinema: The Role and Influence of the Socially Committed Film Producer in Peru,’ in Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Resisting Neoliberalism? eds. Claudia Sandberg and Carolina Rocha (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 6. Sofía Guerrero Gámez and Giselle Marie Bello, ‘Los derechos y la inclusión de las personas LGBTI en Perú en tiempos de coronavirus,’ Banco Mundial…Blogs [online] June 10, 2020, available at https://blogs.worldbank.org/es/latinamerica/los-derechos-y-

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la-inclusion-de-las-personas-lgbti-en-peru-en-tiempos-de-corona virus. 7. Mónica Delgado, ‘Festival de Lima 2017: Retablo de Álvaro Delgado-Aparicio,’ Desistfilm [online] August 11, 2017, available at https://desistfilm.com/festival-de-lima-retablo-de-alvaro-del gado-aparicio/?fbclid=IwAR3lanxUR2Rnbatzy6JpkDG7ZhPZ 7FBvXUoPMD7RLcYXYhqu0veU89kibu0. 8. Ubilluz Raygada, ‘¿Nuevos sujetos subalternos?’ 9. Cecilia Méndez, ‘De indio a serrano: nociones de raza y geografía en el Perú (siglos XVIII-XXI),’ Histórica 35, No. 1 (2011), 53. 10. Juan José Beteta, ‘Wiñaypacha.’ 11. Mónica Delgado, ‘Wiñaypacha: contra la muerte del mito,’ Desistfilm [online] September 24, 2018, available at http://desistfilm. com/winaypacha-contra-la-muerte-del-mito/ [Accessed 22 June 2019]. 12. See Chapter 2. 13. Ricardo Bedoya, El cine sonoro en el Perú (Lima: Fondo editorial Universidad de Lima, 2013), 135. 14. According to Luis Figueroa (1991), Víctor Chambi was Indigenous, but he did not speak Quechua. The members of the Cine Club Cuzco were all from middle-class/bourgeois Cuzqueño sectors. Luis Figueroa ‘Interview,’ in El cine en el Perú: 1950– 1972. Testimonios, ed. Giancarlo Carbone (Lima: Fondo editorial de la Universidad de Lima, 1993). The producers of Kukuli were from Lima. These filmmakers continued to make films until the end of the 1980s (Figueroa’s last film was Yawar fiesta: Fiesta de sangre, made in 1980 and released in 1986). In the 1970s, the Cuzqueño Federico García Hurtado started making films on Andean communities, proposing a political cine campesino that focussed on the contemporary struggles and realities of Indigenous peasants with successful productions such as Kuntur Wachana (released in 1977), while in the 1980s, the films by the Grupo Chaski centred on the experience of Andean migrants in Lima with films such as Gregorio (1984) and Juliana (1988). 15. Natalia Majluf, ‘Nacionalismo e Indigenismo en el arte americano,’ 249. 16. José Carlos Mariátegui, Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (Lima: Amauta, 1928).

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17. Marisol de la Cadena, Indígenas mestizos: Raza y cultura en el Cuzco (Lima: IEP Ediciones, 2004). 18. Emilio Bustamante, ‘Festival de Lima 2017: La aymara Wiñaypacha remite a Ozu, Kurosawa y Béla Tarr,’ Cine Encuentro [online] August 5, 2017, available at https://www.cinencuentro. com/2017/08/05/critica-festival-de-lima-2017-aymara-winayp acha-ozu-kurosawa-bela-tarr/ [Accessed 10 June 2019]. 19. Mónica Delgado, ‘Wiñaypacha.’ 20. Ricardo Bedoya, El cine sonoro, 136. 21. Rowe and Schelling, Memory and Modernity, 4. 22. Natalia Majluf, ‘The Creation of the Image of the Indian in 19thCentury Peru: The Paintings of Francisco Laso (1823–1869)’ (PhD diss., The University of Texas at Austin, 1995). For a discussion of the notion of authenticity in Kukuli, see Julie Vivier ‘Una mirada “auténtica”: el “indígena” cuzqueño en la producción fotográfica de Martín Chambi, la película Kukuli y la publicidad turística’ (MA tesis, University of Montreal, 2015). 23. Mendoza, Creating Our Own, 6–7. 24. Mendoza, Creating Our Own, 6–7. 25. André Gide 1896, quoted in Anon., ‘Cine en lenguas indígenas tiene décadas en Perú y vuelve por sus fueros,’ Sputnik [online] 5 March, available at https://mundo.sputniknews.com/america-lat ina/201903061085900526-cine-lenguas-indigenas-peru/. 26. De la Cadena, Indigenas mestizos, 38. 27. Furthermore, the city evoked in the film through the absent child might be an Andean city such as Puno, and not Lima. 28. Beteta, ‘Wiñaypacha.’ 29. Germán Morong Reyes, ‘El indio melancólico y temeroso: representaciones de alteridad en dos textos de Indias, Perú colonial siglos XVI-XVII,’ Diálogo Andino 45 (2014). 30. Gleghorn, ‘Indigenous Filmmaking,’ 167. 31. Javier Lajo, ‘Pacha y paqha: tiempo y espacio en la filosofía andina. América Latina en movimiento’ [online] June 24, 2016, available at https://www.alainet.org/es/articulo/178353. 32. Lajo, ‘Pacha y paqha.’ 33. María Paz Valdivia, ‘Cosmovisión aymara y su aplicación práctica en un contexto sanitario del norte de Chile,’ Revista de Bioética y Derecho 7 [online] 2, 2006, available at http://www.ub.edu/fildt/ revista/pdf/RByD7_ArtValdivia.pdf.

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34. Lajo, ‘Pacha y paqha.’ 35. Quoted in Slow Cinema, eds., Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 1. 36. De Luca and Barradas Jorge, Slow Cinema, 7. 37. De Luca and Barradas Jorge, Slow Cinema, 14. 38. Karl Schoonover, ‘Wastrels of Time: Slow Cinema’s Labouring Body, the Political Spectator, and the Queer,’ The Journal of Cinema and Media 53, No. 1 (2012), 66–67. 39. Romero, ‘Hamaca Paraguaya,’ 312. 40. De Luca and Barradas Jorge, Slow Cinema, 15. 41. Romero, ‘Hamaca Paraguaya,’ 314. 42. De Luca and Barradas Jorge, Slow Cinema, 209. 43. See Sergio Burstein, ‘Esta impresionante “Canción sin nombre” le da voz a los peruanos oprimidos de ayer y de hoy,’ Los Angeles Times [online] August 8, 2020, available at https://www.latimes. com/espanol/entretenimiento/articulo/2020-08-08/esta-impres ionante-cancion-sin-nombre-le-da-voz-a-los-peruanos-oprimidos. 44. Facultad de Estudios Generales Letras, PUCP, ‘Revive el conversatorio sobre la película peruana “Canción sin nombre”’ [online] May 14, 2021, available at https://facultad.pucp.edu.pe/gen erales-letras/revive-el-conversatorio-sobre-la-pelicula-peruana-can cion-sin-nombre/. 45. Guy Lodge, ‘Song Without a Name,’ Variety [online] May 18, 2019, available at https://variety.com/2019/film/reviews/songwithout-a-name-review-cancion-sin-nombre-1203219363/. 46. María Eugenia Ulfe, ‘Filming Horror in Post-conflict Peru: Making and Marketing La Casa Rosada,’ in eds. Vich and Barrow, Peruvian Cinema, 110. 47. Ulfe, ‘Filming Horror,’ 110. 48. Thomas Abbot and Robin King, ‘Lima’s Villa El Salvador: A Story of Structured Informal Development,’ TheCityFix [online] February 17, 2016, available at https://thecityfix.com/blog/ lima-peru-villa-el-salvador-story-ordered-informal-developmentthomas-abbot-robin-king/. 49. Andrea Cabel, ‘Melina León y su “Canción sin nombre”,’ lamula.pe [online] January 22, 2021, available at https://deunsi lencioajeno.lamula.pe/2021/01/22/melina-leon-y-su-cancionsin-nombre/andrea.cabel/?fbclid=IwAR3mv-lYV9FWtultwN0o3 PhnEicIAi_vymYhlqSSFzXI1aT_QDYzG0GuaOE.

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50. César Becerra, ‘Pamela Mendoza y Tommy Párraga, los protagonistas de “Canción sin nombre”,’ cosas.pe [online] Agosto 12, 2019, available at https://cosas.pe/cultura/161608/pamelamendoza-y-tommy-parraga-los-protagonistas-de-cancion-sin-nom bre/. 51. Facultad de Estudios Generales Letras, PUCP, ‘Revive el conversatorio.’

Index

A Abject, 180 Academy Awards, 34, 88, 102, 121, 155 Acculturation, 2, 51, 133, 259, 267 Activation, 21, 143, 226, 238 Activism, 5, 10, 11, 14, 15, 19–21, 135, 198, 205, 214, 215, 218, 226, 238, 242, 243 Aesthetics, 5–9, 15, 19, 30, 34, 55, 57, 63–67, 70, 90, 94, 102, 107, 108, 125, 126, 144, 152, 161, 165, 167, 177, 182–184, 186, 188, 199, 205, 214, 216, 248–251, 257, 259, 260, 262, 264, 265 Aesthetics of weakness, 124 Aesthetization, 126, 153, 248 Affect, 6, 9, 10, 13, 14, 20, 36, 72, 75, 105, 143, 151, 163, 166, 168–171, 177, 180, 183, 184, 207, 239, 255, 260, 262 Affect of domination, 164, 167, 169, 170

After life of films, 19. See also Social life of films Agamben, Giorgio, 123, 124, 128, 155 Agency, 1, 4, 9, 18, 23, 40–42, 49, 52, 72, 91, 94, 96–99, 110, 129, 131, 141, 145, 154, 178, 180, 189, 198, 212, 217, 229, 232, 241, 263 Agro-business (Brazilian), 201, 203 Aguilar, Carlos, 118, 119 Aguilar, Gonzalo, 9, 20, 25, 31 Ahmed, Sara, 179, 193, 239 Ají de fideos , 168, 172, 173, 175 Alfaro Córdoba, Amanda, 92, 93, 96, 114–116 Alliance, 6, 107, 137, 170, 198, 206, 225, 226, 263, 265, 266 affective, 6, 206, 218, 225, 265, 266 political, 6, 198, 218, 225 Ally, Shireen, 191 Álvarez, Santiago, 215, 223 Aman, Robert, 3, 22

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. C. D’Argenio, Indigenous Plots in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93914-4

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274

INDEX

Amazon, 19 Amazonian, 13, 23, 65, 121, 126, 127, 130–132, 140, 141, 145, 148, 151, 152, 154, 157, 161, 207 communities, 130 culture, 130 departments, 126 language, 23, 131 region, 131, 157 Andean, 18, 35–37, 39, 41–44, 47, 49–67, 70, 75, 166, 170, 185, 187, 188, 236, 248–258, 262–264, 266, 267, 269 culture, 39, 43, 44, 47, 51, 54–56, 58–60, 63, 64, 251, 252, 254, 256, 262 song, 40, 58, 61 subject, 53, 257 world, 42, 44, 56, 57, 61, 62, 70, 252, 262, 263 Andeanness, 65, 75 Andes, the, 49, 56, 60–62, 72, 252, 257 Anthropology, 12, 93, 98, 138, 146, 153, 250 Anti-colonial, 142 Aparicio, Yalitza, 15, 30 Appadurai, Arjun, 9, 24, 64 Apu, 253 Argentina, 189, 204, 205, 214 Argentine dictatorship, 204, 205 Arguedas, José María, 58–60, 81, 170, 191 Arteaga, Claudia, 220, 224 Art-house aesthetics, 108, 238 Authenticity, 7, 56, 67, 73, 98, 116, 139, 153, 199, 200, 232, 240, 251, 255, 256, 270 Aves sin nido, 52–54, 80, 257 Áviles, Ángel David, 242, 243

Award ceremony, 33, 34, 72, 73, 74. See also Berlinale; Berlin film festival Aymara language, culture, 170, 259, 260 B Baker, Peter, 190 Bal, Mieke, 20, 21, 31, 245 Barbarism, 52, 108, 132. See also Civilization Barrow, Sarah, 6, 14, 27, 30, 76, 78, 85, 268 Barthes, Roland, 6, 23, 111, 119 Bassam, Neil, 220, 224 Basset, Vincent, 240, 245 Beasley-Murray, Jon, 44, 45, 62, 78, 81 Bechis, Marco, 17, 19, 20, 197–199, 204, 205, 214–219, 221, 232, 242, 243 Bedoya, Ricardo, 47, 79, 84, 85, 252, 270 Belief system, 69 Belonging, 7, 18, 33, 75, 93, 121, 122, 135, 141, 164, 177, 180, 207, 209, 241 Bennett, Jill, 9, 25 Berghahn, Daniela, 98, 101, 116 Bergthaller, Hannes, 194 Berlinale, 7, 28, 29, 33, 34, 72, 73, 75, 87, 89, 114, 221 Berlin Film Festival, 7, 74, 88 Beteta, Juan José, 44, 250, 257, 268–270 Beverley, John, 103, 118 Bhabha, Homi K., 178, 193 Birdwatchers , 197, 208. See also La terra degli uomini rossi; Terra vermelha Birlocha, 176, 187 Birri, Fernando, 214

INDEX

Black and white aesthetics, 153 Black Lives Matter, 10, 25 Body, 37, 39, 40, 47, 69, 132, 134, 137, 168, 176–180, 201 Bolivia, 11, 26, 164–167, 170, 175, 176, 181, 182, 184, 185, 189, 214, 223 Bondy, Sebastián Salazar, 254 Bourdieu, Pierre, 77, 172, 173, 192 Bourgeoise, 188 Bourgeoise (Aymara), 166, 181, 186 Brasil, 208 Brown, Wendy, 135, 136, 157 Bustamante, Emilio, 268, 270 Bustamante, Jayro, 17, 72, 87–92, 96, 98, 100–102, 106–112, 114, 116, 118, 119, 209, 254 Butler, Judith, 179, 180, 193 Buttes, Stephan, 177, 193

C Caboclo, 133 Cáceres, Eduardo, 102, 109 Calinescu, Matei, 63, 82 Camerawork, 44, 66, 68, 109, 151, 199, 208 Campos, Minerva, 24, 30 Canción sin nombre, 17, 19, 248, 250, 262, 264–267, 271, 272 Cánepa Koch, Gisela, 18, 27, 38, 39 Cannes film festival, 121, 267 Canrey Chico, 43 ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, 232. See also Spivak, Gayatri Capitalism, 13, 132, 134, 140, 207, 208, 211, 212, 235, 253, 260–262 Carpentier, Alejo, 144, 159 Casement, Roger, 133, 134 Castañeda, Claudia, 191 Castillo, Debra, 93, 94, 115, 116

275

Casting, 34, 41, 96, 130, 234, 236, 237, 255, 257, 266, 267 Castro Pérez, Raúl, 75 Catacora, Óscar, 1, 17, 247 Cecchetti, Federico, 17, 225, 228–231, 237, 240, 242, 244 Chacón, Gloria Elizabeth, 12, 26, 115 Chambi, Martín, 56, 252, 270 Chambi, Víctor, 252, 269 Chicha, 65, 66 cultura, 65 music, 65, 66 Child, 10, 35, 37, 40, 51, 91, 92, 96, 107, 123, 168, 170, 171, 174, 230, 254, 259, 263, 265–267 trope, 254, 259 Childhood, 53, 132, 170, 171, 251, 263 Child trafficking, 263 Chola paceña, 186 Choledad, 66, 252 Chronicles (colonial), 143, 144 Chullachaki, 127, 139 Cien años de soledad, 69, 70 Cilento, Fabrizio, 158 Cine Club Cuzco, 252, 269 Cine en producción, 88 Cinema, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 13, 14, 17, 18, 20, 21, 23, 28, 68, 72, 76, 87, 89, 92, 93, 97–101, 106, 108, 109, 114, 122, 123, 128, 135, 142, 149, 153, 154, 163, 165, 171, 174, 182, 205, 214, 215, 221, 225, 248, 251, 252, 260, 263, 265 Cinematography, 90, 134, 212, 216, 253, 265 Cine regional , 248 Cisneros Sandra, 110, 119 Citizenship, 12, 38, 97, 101, 107, 135, 136, 150, 204, 261, 262

276

INDEX

Civilization, 8, 46, 47, 52, 53, 60, 134, 137, 203, 263 Class, 9, 11, 13, 51, 52, 54, 57, 65–67, 101, 107, 109, 164–167, 173–177, 182, 184–189, 252 Clifford, James, 160, 161 Clothing, 75, 131, 182, 187, 188, 233, 235, 237 Codesido, Julia, 55 Coevalness (denial of), 12, 236 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, 123, 155 Colombia, 11, 13, 121–123, 125, 126, 132, 134, 147, 153, 155, 214 Colombian cinema, 153 Colonialism, 3, 23, 61, 76, 92, 130, 135, 137, 138, 144, 146, 149, 207, 212 internal, 12, 165 Colonialist discourse, 8, 51, 144 Coloniality of human rights, 135 Coloniality of power, 137, 140, 158, 160, 173, 180 Coloniality of taste, 167, 173, 174 Colonial tropes, 207 Columbus, Cristopher, 10, 144–146 Comida nacional (Bolivia), 172 Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico, 102, 106 Consumerism, 12, 39 Contact zone, 111, 130, 235 Contradicciones no-coetáneas , 182 Co-production, 4, 7, 34, 66, 67, 83, 87, 197 Córdova, Amalia, 14, 28, 29, 224 Cornejo Polar, Antonio, 2, 53, 57, 80, 253 Coroy, María Mercedes, 18, 88–90, 102 Cosmogony, 139, 149, 240. See also Indigenous, cosmogony Cosmopolitics, 242, 243

Cosmovision, 92, 210 Criollo, 44, 52 Cuarón, Alfonso, 15, 17, 92, 164, 182, 183, 225 Cuatrotablas, 266 Cubeo, 130 Cultural intimacy, 6, 262, 266 Cumbia peruana, 82 Cusicanqui, Silvia Rivera, 174, 181, 185, 193, 194

D Damnation, 137 Damnés , 136, 137 da Silva, Eliane Juca, 7, 197, 198, 203, 218, 219 Davies, Wade, 156 Decolonial, 3, 4, 11, 14, 18, 142, 153, 186, 194, 220, 221, 226 Decoloniality, 4, 10, 22, 23, 122, 142, 152, 154 Decolonization, 10, 22, 70, 136, 137, 140, 142, 154 Deculturalization, 132, 133 Deforestation, 197, 199, 203 Degregori, Carlos Iván, 3, 22 Dehumanization, 124, 131, 134 de la Cadena, Marisol, 6, 12, 26, 27, 141, 158, 161, 245, 254, 270 de Lauretis, Teresa, 129, 156 Deleuze, Gilles, 9, 20, 171 Delgado Aparicio, Álvaro, 17, 247, 249, 268 Delgado, Mónica, 44, 78, 249, 269, 270 del Pilar Blanco, María, 105, 118 De Luca, Thiago, 271 D’Lugo, Marvin, 21, 27, 28 Dennison, Stephanie, 30, 83, 114 Derrida, Jacques, 105 de Santana Pinho, Patricia, 193

INDEX

de Sousa Santos, Boaventura, 136, 142, 158, 218 de Valck, Marijke, 15, 30 Dirt, 177, 178, 180 Displacement, 39, 49, 123, 138, 141, 177 Distance, 49, 57, 58, 93, 113, 125, 153, 170, 208, 237, 263 Distribution, 19, 88, 97, 98, 101, 113, 116, 163, 216, 221, 226, 248 Documentary, 61, 108, 154, 163, 204, 217, 218, 225, 228, 230, 252, 255, 257 Domestic labour, 164, 169 servant, 35, 104, 163–165, 167, 168, 170, 177, 179, 180 service, 167, 170, 181 worker, 13, 164, 165, 168, 179, 180 Douglas, Mary, 177, 193 Downey, Anthony, 155, 156 Dreher, Tanja, 232, 244 Duty-memory cinema, 38, 113

E Echart Muñoz, Enara, 13, 27 Ecocide, 20, 23, 198, 203, 204 El abrazo de la serpiente, 13, 17, 20, 28, 72, 97, 98, 121, 122, 125–128, 130–132, 135, 138, 140, 142, 147–154, 198, 206, 230 ‘El Ayla’, 60, 81 Ellsworth, Elizabeth, 212, 223 El ombligo de Guie’dani (Xquipi’ Guie’dani), 17, 164 Elsaesser, Thomas, 7, 24, 99, 117, 119 El sueño del mara’akame, 18, 29, 225–232, 236, 238, 240–243

277

Emotion, 10, 20, 37, 39, 168, 169, 171, 186, 197, 232, 239, 243, 258. See also Affect Empathy, 10, 41, 42, 107, 109, 113, 124, 125, 134, 221, 239 Employers, 168, 170, 172, 179, 180, 184 Episteme, 140, 207. See also Indigenous, episteme Epistemic, 4, 10, 11, 22, 129, 140, 142, 145–147, 149, 154, 208, 209, 230, 231, 242 difference, 208, 209 extractivism, 146 superiority, 142 vulnerability, 129, 231 Epistemology, 141, 142, 145, 209, 229, 232, 242 Estrada, Alicia Ivonne, 237, 244, 245 Ethical approaches to filmmaking, 262, 267 Ethics of realism, 113 Ethnic, 12, 38, 46, 66, 75, 92, 99, 102, 107, 172, 173, 182, 186, 262 Ethnicity, 4, 18, 71, 135, 165, 166, 187, 188 Ethnofiction, 228 Eurocentrism, 10, 23, 47, 129 Evangelization, 131, 227, 249 Exoticism, 7, 23, 94, 98, 101, 116 Exoticization, 44, 90, 97, 129 Extractive view, 210 Extractivism, 12, 23, 147, 208, 210, 226, 241–243 F Fabian, Johannes, 12, 27, 139, 158 Falicov, Tamara, 7, 24, 30, 67, 83, 245 Faris, Wendy, 70, 71, 84 Farthing, Linda C., 194

278

INDEX

Femininity, 152, 181, 256 Figueroa, Luis, 252, 269 Film, 4–7, 9, 10, 13, 14, 16–20, 22, 24, 28, 30, 33–44, 46, 47, 49–51, 54, 57–64, 66–76, 81–84, 87–103, 105, 107–113, 116, 121–135, 137, 139–143, 145–155, 158, 163–167, 169, 170, 172–186, 188–190, 197–201, 203, 205–221, 224–234, 236–243, 247–251, 253–270 Film festival, 1, 2, 5–7, 15, 16, 23, 28–30, 43, 66, 67, 89, 101, 102, 108, 109, 126, 165, 197, 198, 219–221, 248 Filmmakers, 2, 4, 7, 8, 16–21, 24, 28–30, 33, 42, 63, 67, 71, 73, 87, 89, 90, 96, 97, 100, 101, 105, 107, 112, 126, 130, 131, 149, 154, 163, 164, 167, 171, 182, 197, 204–206, 214–217, 220, 221, 225, 226, 228, 230–233, 237, 242, 248–250, 252, 263, 265–267, 269 Flores Galindo, Alberto, 166, 190 Folklore, 55, 251, 252, 255–257 Folkorization, 256 Fourth Cinema, 206, 214, 215 Franco, Jean, 24 Frey, Aline, 207, 210, 222 Frontier-making, 13, 211, 212 Funding scheme, 7, 16, 17, 23, 24, 30, 76, 87, 89, 248 G Gallego, Cristina, 17, 121–123, 125, 126, 135, 137, 149, 151 García Hurtado, Federico, 269 García Márquez, Gabriel, 188 Gaze, 18, 35, 41, 44, 50, 60, 67, 71, 94, 99, 101, 110, 128, 143, 148,

151, 153, 154, 171, 177, 183, 199, 210, 229, 250, 257 Gender, 13, 38, 90, 110, 129, 164–166, 173–175, 177, 179, 180, 182, 250 Genocide, 97, 101–103, 105–108, 111, 123, 126, 135, 204–206 Geraghty, Niall, 80 Ghost, 104–108, 110 Ginsburg, Faye, 235, 238, 245 Gleghorn, Charlotte, 14, 26–28, 75, 85, 145, 147, 149, 151, 154, 158–161, 214, 222, 223, 230, 244, 270 Globalization, 3, 13, 19, 23, 140 Global South, 7 Golden Globes, 102 Gómez-Barris, Macarena, 210 Gómez Menjivar, Jennifer, 12, 26, 27, 115 González de Canales Carcereny, Júlia, 115 Gordon, Avery F., 105, 108, 118, 119 Grammar of lacking, 98 Greenblatt, Stephen, 146, 159, 160 Grupo Chaski, 269 Guanano, 130 Guaraní, 16, 18, 165, 197, 199, 202, 213, 218 Guaraní-Kaiowá, 23, 197–208, 210–213, 216–218, 220 Guardia Hernández, Andrea, 155 Guatemala, 11, 23, 72, 88–94, 96, 97, 100–103, 105–109, 111–113, 117 Guatemalan cinema, 89 Guerra, Ciro, 17, 28, 72, 98, 101, 116, 121–123, 125, 126, 135, 137, 147, 149, 151, 154, 156, 160, 206, 231

INDEX

Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, Encarnación, 169, 191 Guya Roka, 218 Guzauskyte, Evelina, 145, 159 H Habitus, 165, 176, 182, 184, 189 Halle, Randall, 7, 8, 24 Hall, Stuart, 8, 24, 235, 244 Hamaca Paraguaya, 16, 17, 31, 260, 271 Hantke, Steffen, 155 Hart, Stephen M., 24, 27, 69, 70, 84, 154 Haunting, 9, 40, 102, 103, 105, 107–111, 113 Healing, 39, 42, 124, 127, 157, 227, 228, 233, 239 Hearne, Joanna, 245 Hegemony, 44, 134, 150, 261 Herencia, 54 Hernández Salazar, Daniel, 106, 113 Heterogeneity, 2, 57, 125, 153, 181, 182, 184, 262 Hibbett, Alexandra, 38, 39, 41, 42, 76, 78, 158 Hirsch, Marianne, 40, 78, 119 Holistic cultural criticism, 5, 33, 34 Homo sacer, 124, 125, 155. See also Agamben, Giorgio Horror, 10, 108–110, 123, 136 Huayco, E.P.S., 63 Huichol music, 234–237, 244 Huicholness, 235, 238 Hulme-Lippert, Michelle, 135, 151, 157 Humanity, 122–126, 128, 129, 131, 134–136, 150, 154 Human rights, 23, 28, 37, 40, 97, 100–102, 106, 116, 117, 131, 135, 136, 142, 150, 151, 197, 204

279

Human rights discourse, 18, 136, 142 I Ideology, 52, 126, 128, 133, 175, 187, 216 Indianism, 56 Indianizing film, 236. See also Schiwy, Frida Indigeneity, 2, 4, 8, 12, 14, 18, 23, 33, 34, 42–44, 72, 89, 90, 92–94, 111, 121, 130, 132, 139, 141, 149, 151, 153, 165, 173, 174, 185–187, 190, 198–200, 205, 206, 208, 212–215, 217, 231, 240, 249, 250, 256, 258, 259, 261, 262 Indigeneization, 23 Indigenismo, indigenista, 2, 4, 41, 54–57, 94, 225, 250, 252–258 Indigenista iconography, 56 literature, 55, 57, 252 painting, 55 photography, 55, 56, 252, 258 tradition, 2, 4, 250 type, 54, 55 Indigenous, 1–16, 18, 23, 26, 28, 29, 34, 35, 44, 46, 52–55, 57, 59, 67, 71, 72, 74, 75, 87, 90–94, 96, 97, 100, 102, 104, 105, 107, 111, 117, 125–135, 137, 139, 140, 142, 143, 145–149, 151–153, 163–168, 170–174, 176–179, 184–189, 197–200, 202–214, 216–218, 220, 225–230, 232, 233, 235–242, 247, 248, 250–252, 254–256, 258, 259, 261–263 cosmogony, 130 culture, 2, 4, 11, 34, 50, 52, 55, 70, 71, 75, 105, 125, 126, 130, 131, 133, 135, 139, 147,

280

INDEX

151, 173, 174, 218, 227, 231, 236, 237, 251, 252, 254, 256, 262 departments, 126 episteme, 140, 207 experience, 2, 4, 5, 9, 16, 87, 91, 113, 170, 171, 216, 228, 251, 262, 263 filmmaking, 6, 8, 14, 19, 206, 214, 218 land, 12, 141, 197, 202, 203, 207–213 languages, 1, 4, 16–18, 74, 75, 87, 93, 100, 111, 128, 130, 131, 185, 200, 216, 229, 235, 248, 251 migrant, 34, 63 modernity, 44, 51, 54, 64, 72, 200, 207, 226, 233–235, 237 music, 55, 75, 226, 233–235 people, 3, 10, 11, 13, 15, 43, 46, 51, 53, 54, 67, 68, 73, 91, 92, 97, 100, 113, 114, 122, 130, 131, 133, 153, 154, 185, 187, 197, 198, 200, 202, 207–209, 211, 213, 214, 225, 227, 232, 235, 237, 239, 253, 256 plots, 1, 2, 4, 7, 9, 12, 14, 16–20, 74, 247 subject, 8, 18, 34, 53–55, 57, 63, 64, 127, 132, 137, 138, 141, 149, 152, 199, 211, 240, 256, 262 university, 12 Indio, 101, 117, 198, 213, 253 Ineffability, 143–145, 152 Inequality, 11, 13, 20, 91, 153 ‘Instant Indian’, 44 Inter/cultural, 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 10, 18–21, 23, 28, 29, 87, 99, 229, 237, 242 Interculturalidad, 3, 4, 11, 23, 96

Interculturality, 3, 4, 23, 147, 148, 257 Internal conflict (Guatemala), 102 Internal conflict (Peru), 262 Internal war, 9, 35–38, 107, 262 Intervention, 6, 7, 21, 38, 39, 42, 53, 90, 100, 101, 106, 134, 148, 171, 200, 204, 206, 215, 217, 218 Intimacy. See Cultural intimacy for intimacy as a mode of production, 96 Ioris, Antonio, 211–213, 221–223 Irigaray, Luce, 178, 193 Ixcanul , 17, 18, 57, 72, 87–92, 95–98, 100–102, 112, 113, 208 J Jailones , 165, 166, 174, 182, 183 Jorge, Nuno Barradas, 271 Jünger, Ernest, 240 K Kantaris, Geoffrey Elia, 119 Kaplan, Ann E., 42, 109, 117–119 Kaqchikel, 23, 87–93, 96, 97, 100, 105, 114, 116 culture, 91–93 language, 111 population, 88, 91 King, John, 24, 223 Kitsch, 63–65 Koch-Grunberg, Theodor, 126, 143, 145, 159 Kohl, Benjamin H., 194 Kollnig, Sarah, 173, 190–192 Kroll, Juli A., 44, 49, 79, 81 Kukuli, 252, 254–257, 269, 270 L Labanyi, Jo, 105, 107, 117, 118

INDEX

Labour, 5, 94, 132, 140, 164–166, 171, 211, 256, 261 La chorrera, 132–134 Lack, 12, 13, 38, 39, 42, 46, 47, 49, 50, 53, 61, 93, 96, 103, 110, 129, 130, 138, 140, 146, 151, 186, 203, 231, 239, 263–265 Ladino, 102, 111, 117 Lajo, Javier, 259, 260, 270, 271 La llorona (cultural figure), 110 La Llorona (film), 17, 20, 89, 90, 97, 101, 102, 104–111, 113, 118, 119 La llorona (song), 112 La nana, 163, 177, 193 Land, 57, 112, 129, 134, 140, 143, 153, 197, 198, 201, 202, 206, 208–211, 213, 227, 233, 240–242 Land dispossession, 8, 197, 203, 211, 212 La Paz, 165, 169, 183, 184, 186, 187 La sombra del caminante, 122–126, 155 La terra degli uomini rossi, 197, 207. See also Birdwatchers; Terra vermelha La teta asustada (expression), 36, 37, 40 La teta asustada (film), 17, 18, 20, 31, 33–36, 38, 39, 41–43, 45, 47, 49, 50, 54, 56, 58, 60, 64–69, 72, 77, 80, 83, 87, 91, 113, 163 Latin America, 1–4, 10–13, 19, 22, 25, 28, 30, 59, 75, 83, 105, 144, 163, 164, 166, 188, 202, 215, 232, 239, 255, 256 Latin American Cinema, 1, 2, 19, 20 Lauer, Mirko, 55, 57, 80 León, Melina, 17, 247 Liffmann, Paul, 228, 234, 243, 244

281

Lillo, Gastón, 39, 77 Lima, 5, 9, 16, 34, 35, 37, 38, 41, 43, 45, 46, 49, 50, 52, 54, 57, 58, 63–65, 67, 80, 248, 252, 257, 263, 266 Lima film festival, 43, 247 Limeño musicians, 65, 75 Listening (politics of), 232 López, Ana, 21 López Lenci, Yasmine, 80 Lorenzo, Justo, 90, 96, 116 Los ríos profundos , 58, 170, 191 Luna, María, 126 Luna Victoria, Jaime, 268

M Maclean, Kate, 181, 186, 188 Madeinusa, 4, 16–18, 20, 29, 31, 34, 35, 39, 42, 43, 45, 49–51, 53, 54, 56, 58, 61, 62, 64, 67–69, 71, 72, 74, 78, 89, 91, 238, 247, 250, 257 Magical realism, 66, 68–71, 84 Majluf, Natalia, 55, 80, 252, 269, 270 Maldonado-Torres, Nelson, 25, 135–137, 140, 157 Manayaycuna, 45–48, 53, 58–60, 64, 69 Mancharisqa ñuñu, 37, 41 Manchay, 35, 66 Mancinelli, Fabiola, 98, 99, 117 Mara’akame, 225–228, 239, 242 Maravilloso, 144 Marca Perú, 12, 73 Mariátegui, José Carlos, 253, 262, 269 Marks, Laura, 2, 3, 21, 22 Martin, Deborah, 176, 190–193 Martínez Alier, Joan, 13 Maseda, Rebeca, 38, 77 Matriarcado boliviano, 181

282

INDEX

Maya rock, 237, 238 Mbembe, Achille, 201, 203, 221, 222 McClennen, Sophia, 13, 19, 20, 27, 31 Medem, Julio, 68 Media, 9, 10, 14, 15, 19, 23, 62, 71, 72, 97, 100, 214, 215, 219, 226, 227, 232, 234, 236–238, 248, 265 Meers, Philippe, 126, 156 Memory, 18, 23, 35, 38–43, 66, 90, 102, 103, 105–107, 113, 123, 124, 129, 148 Menchú, Rigoberta, 94, 115, 217, 223 Méndez, Cecilia, 269 Mendoza, Pamela, 9, 262 Mendoza, Zoila, 55, 80, 270 Mestizo peoples, 51, 227 Mexico, 11, 12, 22, 164, 183, 189, 227, 236, 239, 240 Michalik, Regina, 193 Mignolo, Walter, 22, 25, 142, 153, 158, 161 Migrant, 35, 50, 63–66, 203, 259, 262, 263, 266, 269 cultura, 65 urban migrant, 67 Militant cinema, 14, 216, 221 Mimicry, 137, 178, 179 Mise-en-scène, 1, 17, 18, 34, 42, 47, 51, 61, 63, 66, 67, 90, 93, 94, 96, 102, 106, 107, 109, 110, 122, 128, 131, 145, 147, 179, 188, 199, 201, 206, 208, 210–212, 216, 217, 228, 230, 233, 242, 257, 258, 263, 265 Mobility, 34, 121, 122, 176, 188 Mode of address, 212 Mode of production, 12, 67, 113, 229, 266

Modernity, 10, 22, 44, 47, 51, 62–64, 66, 73, 81, 93, 94, 124, 128, 139, 140, 142, 200, 207, 233–236, 257 Möller, Frank, 21, 31 Monette, Marie-Eve, 44, 49, 71, 72, 78, 79, 84 Monster, 123 Montero Díaz, Fiorella, 82, 83, 85 Morales, Evo, 164, 166, 184, 188, 189 Moreno, Gaby, 112 Morong Reyes, Germán, 270 Motta, Emiliano, 225, 234 Mouffe, Chantal, 21 Multicultural, 2, 47, 129, 174 approach to cinema, 47, 129 Multiculturalism, 3, 10, 122, 129, 257 Muñoz, José Esteban, 179 Music, 39, 51, 58, 59, 64–66, 75, 125, 148, 175, 177, 179, 199, 225, 226, 233–239, 241, 253, 264 Andean, 51, 58, 177, 179, 264 indigenous music, 75 Myth, 62, 71, 81, 126, 127, 141, 147–149, 151, 230, 255 N Nagib, Lúcia, 6, 23, 67, 95, 97, 116, 267 Naming, 129, 133, 144–146 National identity, 54 Native, 8, 16, 26, 33, 45, 47, 49, 52, 54–56, 58–60, 71, 75, 98, 103, 109, 111, 125–128, 130, 131, 133, 134, 137–139, 141, 142, 147–149, 151, 152, 170, 172, 174, 187, 188, 199, 200, 202, 203, 205, 206, 215, 218, 234, 267

INDEX

culture, 47, 54, 55, 125 language, 16, 33, 58, 75, 103, 109, 111, 130, 131, 149, 152, 170, 188, 234, 267 subject, 56, 128, 139 territory, 56 Necropolitics, 198, 201, 203–205, 212, 213 Neoliberal, 12–14, 66, 122, 124 Neoliberalism, 13, 19, 23 and cinema, 14 Neorealism, 92, 123, 251 Neo-shamanism, 158, 240 New Latin American Cinema, 14, 19. See also Nuevo cine latinoamericano Nichols, Bill, 99, 117 Non-Western, 3, 15, 40, 41, 46, 50, 52, 57, 60, 61, 70, 71, 134, 140, 146, 197, 209, 230 beliefs, 41, 50, 70 cinema, 61 culture, 57, 71 subject, 60, 134 traditions, 52 world, 61, 146 Nora, Pierre, 77 Novela de la selva, 144, 159 Nuevo cine latinoamericano, 14, 198, 205, 206, 214. See also New Latin American Cinema

O Ordoñez Ortegón, Luisa Fernanda, 155 Ortiz, Fernando, 50, 79 Osorio, Oswaldo, 155 Ospina, María, 124, 149, 153, 155, 156, 160, 161 Oxlajuj Aj, 92, 115

283

P Pagán-Teitelbam, Iliana, 79, 81 Page, Philippa, 190, 245 Palaversich, Diana, 44, 78, 79 Párraga, Tommy, 263, 266, 272 Pastor, Beatriz, 145, 159 Páucar,Yeny, 14 Pedagogy, 11, 149, 212, 223 Peeren, Esther, 105, 118 Peligro sierreño, 226, 233, 234, 236, 238, 241 Peredo Beltrán, Elizabeth, 190 Pérez Benavides, Carolina Amanda, 156 Perez, Renee Domino, 119 Peru, 3, 4, 11–14, 22, 23, 33–35, 38, 40, 41, 43, 44, 51, 52, 57, 65, 70–73, 75, 87, 89, 110, 172, 247, 249, 252, 253, 256, 257, 261, 262, 266, 267 Peruvian cinema, 18, 34, 248, 251, 252, 261, 262 Pickering, Michael, 53, 80 Pierce, Joseph M., 93, 115 Pinchot, Ryan Bradley, 140, 158 Poblete, Juan, 244 Podalsky, Laura, 20, 21, 31 Political, 3–5, 7–11, 14, 19–21, 28, 34, 38, 40, 42, 54, 57, 61, 63, 64, 70, 72, 98, 101–103, 106, 107, 109, 112, 113, 124, 125, 132, 133, 135, 136, 142, 144–146, 153, 163, 164, 166, 167, 171, 175, 179, 184, 185, 188, 189, 198, 201, 204–206, 212–215, 217–221, 232, 236, 238, 239, 242, 243, 249–251, 258–264 politics, 9, 11, 12, 19–21, 42, 65, 90, 92, 96, 102, 107, 122, 125, 128, 130, 147, 164, 170–174, 182, 186, 188, 201, 203–205, 207,

284

INDEX

220, 226, 230, 233, 237, 240, 242, 243, 255 Pollera, 186–188 Poole, Deborah, 6, 8, 22–24 Portocarrero, Gonzalo, 47, 54, 79, 80 Post-memory, 40 Pratt, Mary Louise, 130, 156 Press conference, 88, 197, 231, 237 Primitivism, 70, 98, 138, 139, 144 primitive, 44, 46, 47, 52, 53, 56, 60, 98, 132, 144 primitivist narrative, 98–100 Proceso de cambio (Bolivia), 8, 164, 167 Proceso de Reorganización Nacional , 204. See also Argentine dictatorship Public sphere, 2, 6, 38, 42, 90, 103, 106 Q Q’ara, 168, 173, 176 Qarawi, 39 Quechua, 9, 12, 16, 18, 23, 33–39, 41, 43, 46, 47, 50, 51, 57, 58, 61, 71, 74–76, 87, 172, 247–250, 252–255, 260, 267 culture, 4, 42, 75, 250 language, 12, 16, 34, 47, 58, 75, 255, 267 Quechua-speaking population), 33 region, 255 Queer, 177, 179 Quijano, Anibal, 25, 137, 140, 158, 160, 173 Quispe Lázaro, Arturo, 65, 83 R Race, 4, 13, 52, 65, 66, 132, 137, 164, 166, 167, 172, 173, 175, 176, 178, 179, 187, 203, 262

Raheja, Michelle H., 8, 9, 24 Ramos, Alcida Rita, 135, 136, 157, 160 Rancière, Jacques, 5, 23, 42, 78 Randall, Rachel, 27, 191 Realism, 44, 61, 66, 67, 69–71, 103, 225, 228, 255, 267 Realist mode of production, 67, 90, 95, 101 Rebaza-Soraluz, Luis, 22 Recordarás Perú, 73 Resistance, 23, 41, 51, 52, 91, 110, 124, 133, 177, 181, 201, 212, 215, 217, 227, 241, 243, 260, 261, 263, 267 Retablo, 17, 18, 238, 247–251, 264, 268 Reticular approach, 4 Retomada, 197, 201, 203, 208, 210, 211, 213, 218 Rights-promoting storytelling, 135, 136, 151 Ríos Montt, José Efrain, 102, 103, 106 Rogers, Charlotte, 144 Rojas, Adrana, 39, 40, 77 Rojinsky, David, 106, 113, 118, 119 Roma, 15, 17–19, 92, 93, 163, 164, 170 Romero, Judith, 243 Ross, Miriam, 67, 84 Rowe, William, 59, 80–82, 270 Rubber trade, 131, 133, 134, 140, 147 Rueda, Carolina, 38, 77 Rural life, 253 S Sabogal, José, 55 Sala, Xavi, 17, 164 Salazar Borja, Gabriel, 38 Salazar, Juan Francisco, 224

INDEX

Salgado, Sebastião, 154, 161 Sammells, Clare A., 172, 173, 192 Sánchez Prado, Ignacio, 19 Sandoval, Pablo, 3, 22 Sanjinés, Jorge, 214–218, 223, 224 Santaolalla, Isabel, 116 Sarita Colonia, 63 Sasaki, Pauchi, 263 Schelling, Vivian, 59, 81, 82, 270 Schiwy, Freya, 26, 243, 244 Schiwy, Frida, 236 Seguí, Isabel, 232, 244 Selimovic, Inela, 190, 245 Selva, 127, 140, 146, 147, 149, 151, 154, 198 Sendero Luminoso, 36, 37. See also Shining Path Sexual desire, 175 Sexuality, 49, 60, 175, 176, 181 Shamanism, 128, 140, 141, 157, 207, 226, 233, 238, 239. See also Neo-shamanism Shamash, Sarah, 207, 222 Shaviro, Steven, 169, 191 Shaw, Deborah, 6, 21, 31, 67, 71, 77, 83, 84, 163, 190 Shining Path, 36, 41, 264 Shohat, Ella, 2, 10, 21, 22, 25, 46, 47, 58, 61, 79–81, 115, 129, 156, 160, 161 Shultes, Richard Evans, 126, 156 Sierra vs costa (in Peru), 257 Simpson, Andrew, 119 Sipos, Thomas M., 119 Sitnisky, Carolina, 190 Slemon, Stephen, 71, 84 Sloterdijk, Peter, 183, 184, 194 Slow cinema, 250, 260 Slowness, 258–261 Social Darwinism, 53 Social life of films, 33, 34, 72, 74

285

Solidarity, 10, 21, 28, 90, 170, 181, 220, 232, 242, 243, 265 Solier, Magaly, 7, 9, 16, 18, 33, 35, 37, 39, 45, 72–76, 84, 89, 249 Sommer, Doris, 175, 192 Soundtrack, 102, 109, 234, 236, 253 Space, 9, 14, 28, 42, 47, 51, 52, 69, 70, 97, 103, 111, 145, 167, 168, 171, 176, 177, 179, 183, 184, 186, 210, 212, 220, 221, 230, 237, 260, 262 Spectacularization, 40 Spectatorship, 92, 93, 111, 151, 163, 220 Spectrality, 102, 103, 105, 108, 109, 113 Spheres , 183 Spivak, Gayatri, 96, 232 Stam, Robert, 2, 10, 21, 22, 25, 46, 47, 58, 61, 79–81, 115, 129, 156, 160, 161 Stepan, Nancy, 152, 159, 160 Stoler, Ann Laura, 169, 191 Stoller, Paul, 228, 243 Strange bodies, 179, 180 Strategic traditionalism, 238 Suarez, Juana, 122 Subalternity, 44, 65, 164 Sublime, 44, 55, 56, 143, 152, 153, 161, 258 Susto, 37, 40 Sutherland, Camilla, 190, 245 Swanson, Phillip, 70, 84 Swinton, Tilda, 33, 74 Syncretism, 45, 54, 59, 62 cultural, 45 religious, 59

T Taste, 5, 16, 66, 168, 172–174, 177 Taussig, Michael, 134, 157

286

INDEX

Telón, María, 88, 90, 96, 100, 102, 105 Temporality, 123, 182, 250, 258–261 Terra vermelha, 17, 18, 20, 197, 198, 200, 203, 205–207, 209–218, 220, 221, 227, 232, 238, 239, 242, 243. See also Birdwatchers; La terra degli uomini rossi Testimonio, 92, 94, 103, 118, 217, 232 Testimony, 103, 218 Theidon, Kimberly, 36–41, 76, 77 Third Cinema, 19, 214 Tiapuyama-Antonio Bolivar, 13, 121, 127, 131, 141, 156 Ticuna, 130 Tiempo duro, 51 Tiempo santo, 45, 46, 48, 56, 59, 62, 68 Tierney, Dolores, 67, 84 Time (in Andean culture), 259 Torres, Nilbio, 127, 151, 154 Tourism, 72, 73, 84, 89, 98–100, 199, 208, 239, 240 Tradition, 8, 12, 14, 19, 20, 35, 43, 45, 47, 49–57, 60, 62, 63, 93, 94, 96, 101, 110, 113, 149, 172, 198, 200, 212, 226, 233, 234, 238, 240–242, 249–252, 261, 263 Andean, 51, 54, 56, 60, 64, 250, 251 and modernity, 43, 62, 93, 94, 200, 233 Indigenous, 52, 60, 101, 210, 252 Traffic (of children), 91, 94, 96 Transculturation, 50, 51, 64, 133 Trauma, 9, 18, 34, 36, 38–43, 108, 109, 111, 113, 204, 265 war, 34, 41–43 women, 36–39, 41, 43 Trigo, Abril, 65, 79, 83

Tropical, 65, 127, 141, 143, 144, 152, 198 images, 144 jungle, 127, 144 Tropicality, 152 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 38 Peru, 37 Type, 2, 3, 9, 15, 29, 49, 55, 56, 59, 60, 63, 68, 89, 100, 108, 169, 186, 189, 198, 215–218, 228, 232, 234, 240, 242, 249, 256, 260

U Ubilluz Raygada, Juan Carlos, 44, 79, 250, 269 Ulfe, María Eugenia, 271 Unfinished business, 102, 108, 113, 117 Urgency, 206, 215

V Vacas , 68 Valcárcel, Luis, 55, 80 Valdivia, Juan Carlos, 17, 164–166, 171, 173, 175, 176, 182, 183, 190, 193, 194 Valdivia, María Paz, 270 Vázquez, Karina Elizabeth, 192 Venice film festival, 7, 197, 206, 218, 219 Verón, Marco, 213, 218, 223 Vich, Cynthia, 14, 27, 30, 66, 76, 77, 83–85, 271 Victimhood, 34, 40, 41, 110, 263 Video indígena, 14, 198, 214 Vilanova, Núria, 49, 79 Villa El Salvador, 266, 267 Villareal, María, 13, 27

INDEX

Violence, 9, 14, 34, 35, 38–42, 57, 66, 110, 113, 123, 124, 131, 134, 153, 197, 203, 213, 238, 249, 250, 265 political, 9, 14, 34, 38, 39, 41, 42, 66, 113 sexual, 40 Visual culture, 4, 6 Visual economy, 5, 6, 18 Visual event/audiovisual event, 6, 72, 73, 122 Voice, 8, 35, 39, 44, 46, 47, 50, 70, 71, 74, 91, 93, 97, 100, 103, 105, 112, 122–124, 129, 148, 168, 180, 217, 232, 233, 254, 261 W Warden, Nolan, 234, 235, 243–245 Weatherford, Douglas J., 38, 77 West, 34, 43–45, 136, 146, 242, 257, 259 Western, 4, 5, 7, 15, 44, 45, 47, 49, 50, 52–54, 56, 57, 59–62, 64, 69–71, 93, 96, 98–100, 126, 128–131, 134, 136–139, 141–143, 145–152, 154, 165, 176, 182, 185, 187, 197–200, 206, 208, 212, 215, 230, 233, 234, 237–240, 243, 250, 258, 260, 261 cinema, 215 consciousness, 136 culture, 57, 62, 147, 233 gaze, 151, 198, 212, 250 history, 136 subject, 137, 147 tradition, 62, 233 universalism, 150 world, 63, 149 Westernized, 46, 56, 62, 63, 99, 117, 148, 233 culture, 46, 56

287

modernity, 233 subject, 93 Wilson, Emma, 191 Wilson, Stewart, 244, 245 Wiñaypacha, 17, 19, 29, 57, 247, 248, 250–262, 264, 268–270 Wirikuta desert, 225, 227, 240, 241 Witness, 45, 90, 102, 103, 107, 109, 112, 113, 134, 143, 146, 171, 199, 204, 262 spectator, 90, 102, 107, 112, 113 Wixárica, Wixaritari, 18, 225–231, 233–243 ‘Woman Hollering Creek’, 110, 119 World cinema, 7, 15, 16, 66, 67, 92, 99, 116 Worldview, 49, 70, 148 Wuitoto, 130 Wurst, Daniella, 73, 85 Wylie, Lesley, 144, 159, 160 X Xinico Batz, Sandra, 92, 115, 119 Xquipi’ Guie’dani, 17, 164. See also El ombligo de Guie’dani Y Yakruna, 127, 129, 140 Yauenkü Miguee-Miguel Dionisio Ramos, 127 Y tu mamá también, 183 Yuyanapaq, 38 Yvy maraey. Tierra sin Mal , 17, 165 Z Zamorano Villareal, Gabriela, 9, 25 Zona sur (district), 165, 175 Zona sur (film), 164–168, 170–172, 176, 178, 183, 185, 189 Zuluaga, Pedro Adrián, 134, 146, 147, 149, 155, 157, 160