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Introductory course. Unknown geographies of contemporary cinema

Intended for:

General public, especially cinephiles and people interested in discovering and delving deeper into the cinema of countries whose films rarely reach Latin America. This course is an invitation to explore rich and diverse filmographies that, due to limited distribution, tend to remain beyond general reach. These films are often only available to specialists, screened at film festivals, hidden in lost corners of internet platforms, or, more commonly, accessible only through digital piracy. Missing out on these filmographies means overlooking a very rich and fertile area of world cinema. No prior training is required. The course will focus on providing the elements and context necessary to approach key authors and films of contemporary cinema from diverse latitudes.

Museo-Escuela is a space for the enjoyment, expansion, and deepening of knowledge about art today. Each course offers a particular perspective on the history, theory, and practice of art, where people find a different space to learn, enjoy, and experiment.

Presentation

“The United States, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Russia, and Japan are the seven countries that have produced, let’s say, ninety-five percent of the masterpieces of world cinema,” says American critic Richard Roud, cited by Adrian Martin, in the introduction to the two volumes of his work Cinema: A Critical Dictionary. Further on, he also states: “The United States, Great Britain, and France are the three countries in which the best and most influential critical literature is produced, because the study of cinema is necessarily restricted to the world’s metropolises, New York, London, and Paris.” Although the assertion is odious and arrogant, it is nonetheless true from an Anglo/Eurocentric perspective that leaves aside the geopolitical considerations of his claims, which more than assertions are performative utterances. A brief example suffices. The (British) magazine Sight & Sound produces the most famous list of the 100 best films of all time, publishing a new version every decade since 1952. For its 2022 edition, they made an effort to produce a more inclusive and diverse list than previous ones, inviting critics, filmmakers, and curators from around the world to vote. Even so, the result only confirmed Roud’s idea: 85% of the films included in the list belong to one of these seven countries, a figure not very different from previous years when it always exceeded 90%. Without a doubt, the cinema canon is predominantly composed of films from these countries. The matter is even more hegemonic if we focus on audience taste. Today, U.S. cinema controls 75% of the box office worldwide, a percentage that is repeated when one consults the number of films that make up the top 100 in IMDb history, the most visited cinema portal in the world, a list compiled from user votes. These figures state something obvious, which we will nonetheless mention: there is a crushing cultural hegemony. A handful of countries produces the cinema that everyone watches, while hundreds of thousands of films, made in the most diverse places on the planet, which capture the richness of human experience in all its variety, have been relegated to an almost invisible corner, where their very preservation is even threatened. Art, often seen as the most sublime expression of the spirit, is much more attached than we would like to admit to the unequal political composition of the world and, however good the intentions of art may be, it does not escape the logics of domination that permeate all human activities.

The hard numbers are facts of reality, but they are not exempt from creating mythologies. There has been an attempt to install the idea that the cinema of these seven countries has prevailed over the rest exclusively because “it is better.” But what does it mean for a cinema to be better than another? What are the political and historical mechanisms of that superiority? And, more importantly, what can that other “inferior” cinema tell us about the world? It is not about tearing down the aesthetic tradition of the world to proclaim, in a lazy way, the equality of all works and experiences. Art is also a field of dispute in which there are undeniable criteria and tendencies. But faced with such overwhelming inequality, it would be foolish to stop asking: what are we missing by only watching the same thing? When the lists say “the best films of all time,” those times they refer to have been created by largely ignoring almost the entire world. It is a false time, because it actively ignores the geography of the world, full of other chronologies that could dispute and enrich the already existing ones. Therefore, it becomes necessary to review the history of cinema and, perhaps, replace the idea of a cinematographic canon with that of a constellation. A much more horizontal idea, which exposes the criteria by which the “best cinema” imposes itself and creates a common sensibility.

In our region, starting in the 1960s, a handful of filmmakers dared to challenge this canon. Thus emerged the new cinemas (Third Cinema and Cinema Novo, as the most notable examples), whose rage, power, and poetic lucidity shook the ways of seeing and making cinema, which was also replicated on other continents. One of their main fronts was questioning the modes of legitimation and the colonial demands to which cinema adapts according to the European/Anglo-Saxon view of the world. These movements were supported by a context of political and revolutionary ferment that history calmed, leaving this new aesthetic conception as a promise yet to be fulfilled.

In the 1990s, once again, that hegemony suffered new cracks, but on a global scale, when precisely the “masterpieces” started coming from other latitudes. From then on, the reference filmmakers for cinephilia, though not the most widely watched globally, started coming from other countries: Abbas Kiarostami and Samira Makhmalbaf (Iran), Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Edward Yang, and Tsai Ming-Liang (Taiwan), Pedro Costa (Portugal), Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Turkey), Jia Zhangke and Wang Bing (China), Lav Diaz (Philippines), Lucrecia Martel and the El Pampero cinema (Argentina), Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Thailand), Bela Tarr and Agnes Hranitzky (Hungary), Adirley Queiros and Paula Gaitan (Brazil), Carlos Reygadas (Mexico), Radu Jude (Romania), Hong Sang-soo (South Korea), Mati Diop (Senegal), and Abderrahmane Sissako (Mali), to mention only a few. These filmmakers brought about a deterritorialization of cinema’s geographies. Most of the filmmakers mentioned not only come from other latitudes, from geographic and symbolic margins, but their cinema represents a radical rethinking of the production schemes and aesthetic criteria that had prevailed until then. This movement was also accompanied by other ways of understanding curatorships, circulation, and theoretical and critical production. In this new context, Latin America has become a hub of critical production that constantly disputes the hegemony of a canon inherited from the 20th century.

Still, much remains to be done. The emergence of digital distribution and exhibition platforms poses new forms of hegemony and cultural concentration. Although world production is more diverse than ever, accessing other cinemas remains difficult.

In this course, we will explore cinema from much less explored geographies such as: Mali, Senegal, Cameroon, Tunisia, Ghana, Morocco, Vietnam, Philippines, Peru, Paraguay, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Serbia, Georgia, Latvia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, among many others.

Session 1. The other Americas

Docente: Lucía Salas

What separates us from the films of our territory? In 1992, the collective Warmi produced Antuca, by Maria Barea, but the film could only premiere more than 30 years later. Starting from this catastrophe, we will consider some questions about contemporary cinema in Latin America and the Caribbean, its circulation, its aesthetic and political currents, its authors and collective movements from Peru, Ecuador, Paraguay, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Costa Rica, and Bolivia.

Filmography:

• Antuca, Maria Barea/Colectivo Warmi Cine y Video, 1992, Peru
• Historias de Shipibos, Omar Forero, 2023, Peru
• Ramona, Victoria Linares, 2023, Dominican Republic
• Hamaca Paraguaya, Paz Encina, 2006, Paraguay
• Solo la luna nos comprendera, Kim Torres, 2023, Costa Rica
• Antonio Valencia, Daniela Delgado Viteri, 2021, Ecuador

 

About Lucia Salas

Film critic, programmer, and Argentine filmmaker whose work explores the cinema of the past and present. She co-edits the film magazine La vida util, is a professor at the Elias Querejeta Zine Eskola, and programs at Woche der Kritik and Punto de Vista.

Session 2. Africa, the ignored continent

Docente: Victor Guimaraes

A small mosaic of poetics that illustrate the cinematic diversity of the African continent in the 21st century. From science fiction to ancestrality, from genre cinema to documentaries about urgent struggles, from Afrofuturism to Afro-surrealism. In the face of the omnipresent European gaze and thinking from Latin America, what are the forces of dissidence in contemporary African cinema?

Filmography:

• Moolaade, Ousmane Sembene, 2004, Senegal
• Les Saignantes, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, 2005, Cameroon
• Bamako, Abderrahmane Sissako, 2006, Mali
• From a Whisper, Wanuri Kahiu, 2008, Kenya
• Mille Soleils, Mati Diop, 2013, Senegal
• Much Loved, Nabil Ayouch, 2015, Morocco
• Reluctantly Queer, Akosua Adoma Owusu, 2016, Ghana
• Knuckle City, Jahmil X.T. Qubeka, 2019, South Africa

 

About Victor Guimaraes

Film critic, programmer, and professor. He has contributed to publications such as Cinematica, Con Los Ojos Abiertos, Senses of Cinema, Documentary Magazine, La Vida Util, and Cahiers du Cinema. PhD in Communication from the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, with studies at the Universite Sorbonne-Nouvelle (Paris 3).

Session 3. Aesthetics and meteorology: a brief journey through tropical Asian cinema

Docente: Roger Alan Koza

As with literature, perhaps less so with music, linking cinema and nationality and from there speaking of a cinematography invested with a flag is a mechanical act of understanding. It suffices to think deeply about the relationship of a language with a territory to glimpse irregularities and uncritically assume any rigid interpretation of a place. Spanish cinema is a precise example.

The title of our gathering and the demand of the course director impose something else. Speaking of a region no longer circumscribes everything to a nationalist criterion. A region is more than that: it implies an interconnected economy, a shared political history, and likewise a linguistic nomadism that never ceases to refer to the influence of a foreign language or the language imposed by an invader. Those who share a geography, moreover, experience something unalterable: a thermal sensation, a physics of weather. Can one then think about the aesthetics of a region through temperature changes, rainfall patterns, and questions of that nature?

Filmography

In the session, we will choose three auteurs per region: Lav Diaz (Philippines), Yeo Siew Hua (Singapore), and Tsai Ming-liang (Malaysia). The last case is not a mistake; Tsai was born in that country, even though he is identified with Taiwanese cinema. Under the premises expressed above, we will attempt to think about the cinema of a region and its auteurs most sensitive to the territory in which they live or from which they come.

About Roger Alan Koza

Film critic (La Voz del Interior, Revista N, Quid, Television Publica, Canal 10 de Cordoba, 102.3. Mas que musica) and programmer (Doc Buenos Aires, Viennale, Filmfest Hamburg, FICIC). Responsible for the site conlosojosabiertos.com.

Session 4. Post-Soviet European cinema / Conclusion to the unknown geographies of cinema

Instructor: Jerónimo Atehortúa Arteaga

An introduction that will focus on discussing what we understand by contemporary cinema, what its continuities and differences with modern cinema are, as well as the role of geographic decentralization in questioning previous cinematic canons.

During the 20th century, the European cinematic tradition was dominated by a polarity between Western European cinema and Soviet cinema. The dissolution of the USSR in 1991 marked the end of an era and gave rise to new nations and a new geographic understanding. From this transformation emerged cinemas characterized by a critical vision of history and new poetics nourished by local cultural traditions. This module explores three decades of cinema in the Balkans, Central and Eastern Europe, capturing the social and political changes following the Soviet collapse. We will analyze lesser-known films and rediscover classics, showing how post-Soviet cinema has evolved and its impact on the global cinematic landscape.

Filmography

• Depth Two, Ognjen Glavonic, 2016, Serbia
• What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?, Alexandre Koberidze, 2021, Georgia
• Godless, Ralitza Petrova, 2016, Bulgaria
• The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu, Andrei Ujica, 2010, Romania
• Blockade, Sergei Loznitsa, 2006, Russia
• The Hostage, Laila Pakalnina, 2006, Latvia
• Quo Vadis, Aida?, Jasmila Zbanic, 2020, Bosnia and Herzegovina
• The Turin Horse, Bela Tarr and Agnes Hranitzky, 2011, Hungary
• The Other Side of Everything, Mila Turajlic, 2017, Serbia

 

About Jeronimo Atehortua

Director, producer, and film critic. MFA from Film Factory at the Sarajevo Film Academy. Author of the book Los cines por venir. Director of the feature film Mudos testigos (co-directed with Luis Ospina). As a researcher and panelist, he has participated in spaces such as Catedra Bergman (UNAN), Transversal Orientations (MoMA New York). Co-creator of the Taller de Cine de Invasion Cine.

Methodologies