BackHome
Refresh: OffView Personal Schedule
Session Submission Summary

Emerging Forms of Latin American Documentaries

Mon, May 30, 6:00 to 7:30pm, TBA

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

When looking at the history Latin American cinema, the documentary genre occupies a particularly prominent space since the 1940s. The purpose of this panel is to direct our critical gaze at that space with a series of focused questions that may in turn tap onto corollary concerns: How do LA documentaries inform and interrogate our continuing thoughts about the fraught relations between modernity and LA? How do documentaries open critical gateways to conceptualize a new temporality, spatiality, realism, and the ever elusive notion of the real? How do documentaries today continue the tradition of intra- and trans-continental dialogues for which themes of social and political struggles are framed in global terms? Is that still possible after the 20th C.? How do the technological advancements affect the genre's cinematic language? Have Latin American documentaries in the 21st C. changed from the politically engaged films that generated theories on new forms of cinema, e.g., third and imperfect cinema among others? In what ways do documentaries today contribute to the tradition of theorizing new ideas and practices of filmmaking that in turn enrich the already growing cartography of world cinemas? Can the documentary form and documentalism avoid the usual political and aesthetic perils of auteur cinema, or is the former the prime example of the latter? Part of the panel’s goal is to instantiate the conversation of whether documentaries, be they LA or not, can divest themselves of interconnected realism and modernism to generate instead a cinematic language that is other to the indexical, evidentiary or referential.

Sub Track

Session Organizers

Chair

Individual Presentations

Discussant