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No 9 EZTETYKA

Editorial. Eztetyka
Albert Elduque

DOCUMENTS

Revolution
Jorge Sanjinés

Tricontinental
Glauber Rocha

Godard by Solanas. Solanas by Godard
Jean-Luc Godard and Fernando Solanas

FILMS UNDER DISCUSSION. INTERVIEWS

A combative cinema with the people. Interview with Bolivian filmmaker Jorge Sanjinés

ABSTRACT

Jorge Sanjinés was the first film director to produce films in Aymara and Quechua in Bolivia, a country formed mostly by indigenous communities (Aymara, Quechua and Guarani) that until the 1960s had only produced films in the language of the colonizer. In 2013, I had the opportunity to interview the Bolivian filmmaker in the city of La Paz, Bolivia. Sanjinés, who wrote the classic manifesto Theory and Practice of a Cinema With the People (1979), spoke for more than an hour on different topics, from the militant cinema of the 1960s and the 1970s to his current productions. In addition to making a reflection on the relevance of the ideas that he advocated in those years, he spoke of the process of production and exhibition of the films he did about struggle together with indigenous people.

Cristina Alvares Beskow

Conversation with Eryk Rocha: The legacy of the eternal

ABSTRACT

This conversation deals with the prevalence of the ideas of Cinema Novo through the work of the filmmaker Eryk Rocha, by discussing his process of creation and his relationship with the legacy of this cinema movement in which his father, Glauber Rocha, was an essential figure. In addition, it questions the strength of collectiveness in art within the Brazilian and Latin American political context nowadays, and it stresses the relationships between politics and aesthetics highlighting the need to keep constructing a Latin American way of thinking from cinema.

Carolina Sourdis (in collaboration with Andrés Pedraza)

The necessary amateur. Cinema, education and politics. Interview with Cezar Migliorin

ABSTRACT

Interview with Cezar Migliorin, one of the coordinators of the cinema project in Brazilian schools Inventar com a Diferença. We talk about their pedagogical methods, focused on sensitive research with images rather than on the notions of representations, and we discuss the political aspect of cinema made in communities, both in schools and indigenous groups. Working collectively and cinema as a non-professional activity emerge as strong bonds between these works and the manifestos of the New Latin American Cinema. Finally, we deal with the issue of montage, a key element when thinking about political cinema based on the massive production of images taking place today.

Albert Elduque)

ARTICLES

Reading Latin American Third Cinema manifestos today

ABSTRACT

In this essay I establish continuities and discontinuities between our present and the historical context in which Latin American Third Cinema manifestos were written in the sixties, in order to offer some ideas about the relevance of these manifestos today. I draw a minimalist itinerary of emblematic images that political cinema and its manifestos have been articulating since their inception at the beginning of the twentieth century to this day –which center around trains, hunger and thirst– all the while marking a difference between the twentieth century context and our times. While the twentieth century offered certainties about the possibility of different social orders, our present is characterized by the lack of certainty about the survival of the human species on earth and the lack of imagination about alternative forms of social organization. To think the relevance of the sixties manifestos in today’s uncertainty, I identify three fundamental ideas that run through all Third Cinema manifestos. I call these ideas the manifestos’ ‘planetary keys’ in that, even in the sixties, they postulated their validity beyond the local. They refer to 1) the necessity to transform the spectator into an author, 2) the imperative to turn the chaos of misery into something intelligible, and 3) the change in filmic language that would avoid reproducing dominant dramatic structures and offer a different intelligibility of reality by articulating visual stories with a political analysis. I mention images and manifestos by Dziga Vertov, Glauber Rocha, Margot Benacerraf, Fernando Birri, Jorge Sanjinés, Julio García Espinosa, as well as contemporary films by Tin Dirdamal and Diego Quemada-Díez.

Moira Fradinger

From imperfect to popular cinema

ABSTRACT

Misunderstood as a defense of technical imperfection, the idea of imperfect cinema was reviewed by Cuban filmmaker Julio García Espinosa many times: the imperfect cinema is interested in cinema, which will only overcome this condition to the extent that man is free, releasing also art from its instrumentation. It is also to overcome the division of labor: the search is for a cinema that can be created by everyone, leaving behind the author-spectator separation. Likewise art can no longer be an autonomous sphere in relation to other life activities. According to García Espinosa, the adventure of Cuban cinema after the revolution was always a search for the end of the thought/fun dichotomy, and an attempt at a popular cinema. We will investigate, in articles published in a period of more than thirty years, what was meant by the notions imperfect cinema and popular cinema, and how the latter was reconfigured according to the historical moment. Thus, the purpose of this article is to discuss, from the texts compiled in Un largo camino hacia la luz (2002), the concepts of imperfect cinema and popular cinema as conceived by Julio García Espinosa through time and reflect on their permanence nowadays.

Maria Alzuguir Gutierrez

The return of the newsreel (2011-2016) in contemporary cinematic representations of the political event

ABSTRACT

Contemporary cinematic representations of the political event (2011-2016) point to an ongoing dynamic dialectic of ‘structuration’ and ‘destructuration’ of the film forms. In the works of Jem Cohen and Sylvain George documenting, respectively, Occupy Wall Street (USA), 15-M (Spain) and, more recently, Nuit Debout (France), the return of the newsreel highlights the link between the economic structures and the film manifestations, while indicating a dynamic process of formal evolution. From the soviet newsreels to the work of Cohen and George, passing by the New Latin American Cinema, and the North-American Newsreel Group, newsreel’s dynamics enables to reconsider, from both a historical and a formal perspective, the relationship between aesthetics and politics, as well as the established distinction between avant-garde/experimental and political cinema. These issues will be examined through the operation notion of ‘form-event,’ which allows to reconcile two dimensions of the aesthetic production: one, which considers art as a reflection; another, which examines it in terms of its outcomes. Newsreel’s formal development from the post-war until the political and cultural contexts in which it has currently evolved brings up a more enriched genealogy of political filmmaking, revealing complex relationships –and a web of influences beyond national film canon– between historical political cinema and the ‘state of the form’ of this cinema.

Raquel Schefer

ImagiNation

ABSTRACT

In this piece written in 2004, José Carlos Avellar explores the emergence of Cinema Novo in the ‘60s and its legacy for Brazilian films in the ‘90s, especially The Oyster and the Wind (Walter Lima Jr., 1996) and Central Station (Walter Salles, 1998). To that end, the author considers the metaphor of speech/writing to suggest that the movement possessed the creative spontaneity of oral language; the search for a cinematographic identity, in relation to the national culture, the New Latin American Cinema and European and US cinema; and, finally, the attitude of the spectator when faced with images which, according to him, should never undermine his ability to imagine.

José Carlos Avellar

REVIEWS

TEN BRINK, Joram and OPPENHEIMER, Joshua (eds.) Killer Images. Documentary Film, Memory and the Performance of Violence
Bruno Hachero Hernández

MONTIEL, Alejandro; MORAL, Javier and CANET, Fernando (coord.) Javier Maqua: más que un cineasta. Volumes 1 and 2
Alan Salvadó Romero