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7/21/2019 Fusco - About Locating Ourselves and Our Representations http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/fusco-about-locating-ourselves-and-our-representations 1/8 Fusco, Coco, About locating ourselves and our representations , Framework, 36 (1989) p.7 FltAW WOIK o 6 BOUT LOC TING OURSELVES ND OIJB REPRESENT TIONS Though I confess that I have not read the entire essay by Adrienne Rich which has been cited here as an organising framework for discussion, I will address myself in this presentation to the quote I received. Before doing so, or perhaps as a way of first locating myself, I should note that what I do in addition to writing critidsm informs the nature of that writing. As a person involved in exhibition and distri bution of independent cinema I am almost inevitably sensitised. to questio recep- tion and presentation of films, not simply the productions themselves. As a bureaucrat in a granting agency, I am involved in the censorship process that in a sense preselects the films that critics then choose from. Despite the fact that I am somewhat familiar with some of the cultural debates here, my point of reference is the United States, and there are some very important differences in the ways that multicultural policies are carried out here and there. There is a tremendous amount of multinational corporate investment in multiculturalism in the US, a symptom of political agendas we have not yet fully explored. And it is that involvement that underlies and underwrites what is perceived in the mainstream media as our current Latino boom and our new sense of national culture as lI enr iched by diversity . In this presentation, I will focus my attention on Latinos and the New Latin American Cinema, in part because these are areas I am particularly interested in, but also because I wanted to address what New Latin American Cinema has to do Copyright (c) 2006 ProQuest Information and Learning Company Copyright (c) Wayne State University Press P GE 7

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Page 1: Fusco - About Locating Ourselves and Our Representations

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Fusco, Coco, About locating ourselves and our representations , Framework, 36 (1989) p.7

FltAW WOIK o

6

BOUT

LOC TING

OURSELVES

ND OIJB

REPRESENT TIONS

Though I confess

that

I have not read the entire essay

by

Adrienne Rich which

has

been cited

here as an

organising framework for discussion, I will

address

myself

in this

presentation

to the quote

I received. Before

doing

so,

or perhaps as

a

way of

first locating myself, I should note that what I

do

in addition to writing critidsm

informs

the

nature

of

that

writing. As a

person

involved

in

exhibition

and

distri

bution of

independent

cinema I

am

almost inevitably sensitised. to questio recep-

tion

and

presentation

of

films,

not

simply the productions themselves. As a

bureaucrat

in

a

granting

agency, I

am

involved

in

the censorship process

that in

a

sense preselects the films that critics then choose from.

Despite the fact that I

am

somewhat familiar

with

some of the cultural

debates here,

my point of

reference is the United States, and there are some

very

important differences

in

the ways

that

multicultural policies

are

carried

out here

and there. There is a tremendous amount of multinational corporate investment in

multiculturalism in the US, a symptom of political agendas we have not yet fully

explored.

And

it is that involvement that underlies and underwrites what is

perceived in

the

mainstream media as our

current

Latino boom and our

new

sense

of national culture as

lIenr

iched by diversity .

In this presentat ion, I will focus

my

attention on Latinos and the New Latin

American Cinema, in part because these are areas I am particularly interested in,

but also because I

wanted

to address

what

New Latin American Cinema has to do

Copyright (c) 2006 ProQuest Information and Learning Company

Copyright (c) Wayne State University Press

P

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Fusco, Coco, About locating ourselves and our representations , Framework, 36 (1989) p.7

THIR SCENAI IO COtO FLS O

with third cinema as

it

is now used in cultural debates here. The difference be

tween third cinema as it was originally conceptualised and how t is currently

deployed is not the only difference in terminology I must underscore. In the

United States, Black refers to Afro-Americans exclusively, unlike in Britain, where

the question of whether to include other people of colour within the term is at

least discussed. Given the political nature of most multicultural endeavours in the

US I am becoming increasingly wary of employing terms that on the surface refer

exclusively or specifically to race and or ethnicity. In an attempt to avoid this

tendency, I will work here with the term subaltern, which will, I hope, retain a

sense of the o l i t i ~ l l o c t i o n of ethnic categories in relation to film and to cultural

policy.

In preparing this presentation, I went over the questions we were given

several times to

try to figure out what a politics of location might be. My current

area of iftterest is in how subaltern media is poSitioned, absorbed and consumed.

As an historically Euro-American film culture takes on post-colonial discourse,

the issues

of

race

and

representation, and the contexts of those debates, become

the focus of increasing attention, conflict and commodification. It is because of the

intensified commodification of subaltern experience that we speak of crossover

successes in North America and Europe. And it is within the context of this

activity that we must examine practices which

mayor

may not be channelled into

the crossover , or

which

mayor

may not contest this process.

Independent, non-commercial, supposedly non-exploitative film culture

has long depended on maintaining a strict distinction between itself and the com

mercial sector. As funding sources and political agendas overlap more and more,

we

can no longer afford to uphold such distinctions. These areas function as dis

jointed echoes of each other. The non-commercial sector is subjected to increasing

pressure to be more like the commercial sector, and the commercial sector dips

frequently into the non-commercial sector for source material.

Which brings me to Adrienne Rich. Her quote is somewhat of an odd begin

ning for this conference. Her allusion to the priviledged location of the white

Euro-American subject, while emphasising the limits of white middle-class femi

nism, seems to e caught between being an admission of guilt and an invitation to

analyse the balance of power in the presentation and

consumption of subaltern

texts in the

US.

Though t has taken an extraordinarily long time in North Amer

ica, longer than in England, the hegemony of Eurocentric, feminist psychoanalytic

film theory is slowly unravelling. The forces bringing that change about are more

fragmented there than here, as they come from within academia and the art world,

both of which are particularly open to imported post-colonial debates, more so

than they seem to be to local counterparts.

These developments parallel mainstream social engineering in the Reagan

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P G E

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Fusco, Coco, About locating ourselves and our representations , Framework, 36 (1989) p.7

FRAMFWORI

N o 6

era, an important aspect of which is the commodification of ethnicity. Media pro

duction has a

primary

role

in

maintaining a regime of multicultural diversity. In

this depoliticised version of the '60s', ethnic identity becomes

the

focus

of

ongoing

spectacle and aestheticisation, and subaltern popular memory is its terrain. This

simulation of ethnic diversity keeps each group in a fixed place, since

we

each

have the

spotlight

only for as long as

we

express

our

difference. This process

harnesses nationalis t separatism, with its ahistorical notion of race, for the needs

of the marketplace. While

the

statistics indicate

that

minority

groups

constitute

the fastest

growing

sector of the population,

it

is also clear that political and eco

nomic interests

outside

these groups are at stake in the resurgence

of

ethnically

oriented marketing and corporate efforts to support and exert control over

third

world material. This cultural project extends

into

educational polides a Ameri

can High Schools, particularly those

in inner

city areas, begin to revise curricula to

Haccommodate I'differenr' students.

I

do not

mean to

suggest

that

all forms

of

multiculturalism

are

essentially

insidious, but simply

that

the seemingly benign attempts to equate democracy

with diversity need

to

be constantly questioned. Within subaltern

media

practices

and their theorisation, there are

many

key areas

that must

also be subjected to

scrutiny. Reflecting on

recent conferences

both

in England

and

the

US on third

cinema, black cinema

and

post-colonial discourse, there runs through them a

desire to define our relationship to politically engaged cinematic practices from

the 1960s, largely from subaltern cultures,

and to

salvage them

as

the least cor

rupted vestiges

of

new left radicalism. This

path

is supposed

to

help

us

develop a

framework for critical discourse

on

film in

the

present. Within this desire

to

define, however,

there

are several postulated notions of

what the

object

of

that

practice

and

critical reflection on it should be.

And

with each proposal, several

problems emerge. Conceptual difficulties arise when one attempts to create move

ments retroactively. In

much

of

the

scholarship

on

third world cinema

that

has

been

produced in

recent years, there are frequent attempts to define in theory

what was never made clear in practice or commentary.

Looking from the outside, from the first world,

we

have a tendency to take

individual films as representative of Latin America, even though Latin American

history is

marked

by conflict and fragmentation. This lack of

unity

explains to

some extent

why the

cultural identity debates of the

408

50s and 60s were so ro

manticised. The now classical texts of the

New

Latin American Cinema movement

- essays and manifestos such as Fernando Solanas

and

Octavio Getino's TOWARDS

A THIRD CINEMA Julio Garcia Espinosa's FOR AN IMPERFECT CINEMA Glauber

Rocha's

AESTHETICS

OF HUNGER Jorge Sanjines' LANGUAGE AND POPULAR

CULTURE

etc. -these were and

are

fragments, responses to

the

conditions

of

a moment, some

more reflective,

some

more polemical. The so-called

independent

film production

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Fusco, Coco, About locating ourselves and our representations , Framework, 36 (1989) p.7

HIIO SCINAIIO:COCO

Fusco

of

the 1 0& and

early

70s

that these people were involved in was extremely

varied,

and

joined

more by

conditions

of

production

than by

style

or

theme. They

were loosely connected

to

a larger political project of decolonisation, and for third

cinema

they were

very

closely tied to Peronist politics in Argentina

in

the late

6 s

and

early 70s which soon afterwards proved to

be

disastrous.

The films

and the

manifestos,

lfilm

acts , guerilla film units, quasi-mysti

cal and auteurist projects that are all part of the New Latin American Cinema in

volved men, for

the

most part,

who

were from

middle and

upper

class elites of

their countries. Their

sense

of

oppression was largely global

and

political,

not

microaoda1

or

sexual. Their films became known

through

auteurist venues

in

large part, particularly

in

Europe, despite their proclamations

that

their

work was

for the

oppreued,

the masses, or whoever else they designated

as

their ideal

audience.

ThII dGelll't

ch nse the value of their

films,

but

it nonetheless

bears

pomting out

as

a

caveat

against attempts to

constitute a singular third cinema for

any

essentia1ltt, neo-colonial,

or

formalist

end.

Some

very

significant ways

of

thinking

about

cinema

did

come

out

of

this

period. The film-makers

and

critics were acutely

aware

of the need for a multi

dimensional critique

that

could account for film

and media s

function

in

neo

colonial societies,

and

the doubly alienating effect of Hollywood's dominance

outside

America's borders. They addressed questions of race through class,

and

of

class

through

race,

understanding how

colonialism

and

capitalism had inextrica

bly

bound

the

two. They almost always forgot

about

gender. They thought

about

dnema

in relation to audience.

One of

the most important elements of Solanas

and

Getino's TOWARDS

A

THIRD

CINEMA

was their concept of how to exhibit their

work

as film acts in which audiences, primarily labourers

and

trade unionists,

would

discuss

what

they

saw

with the directors, thereby contributing to it

and

transform

ing

spectatorship from passive experience to active encounter.

The

New

Latin American film-makers often

produced

in a context

where

the priviledge of being able

to

afford to

attend

the cinema

with any

regularity

was

enjoyed

by

a small

part

of the population. They thus confronted

the

ethical

dilemma of exposing

one

sector of society's experience to another. These film

makers espoused a variety of attitudes

towards

mainstream narrative as a viable

form

and about

the rhetorical

power

of many commercial films, carefully avoiding

conOating

the

forms with Hollywood as

an

institution. The calls for an imperfect

cinema were in a sense a reaction to pressures

to

produce

media within

the

conditions

of

underdevelopment,

and

then measure the results against

an

exter

nally

produced model which constituted

an

impossible ideal. In its place

was

proposed

an

approach to film-making that could be tendentious, openly polemi

cal, adaptable to immediate needs

and

the resources available,

and

that could be

judged

in

relation to context as well as aesthetic standards. This is

not

an apologist

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Fusco, Coco, About locating ourselves and our representations , Framework, 36 (1989) p.7

F R ~ E W O R K N o 6

stance, but rather a kind of relativist pragmatism that accounts for cinema as it is

affected by resources and political imperatives, analysing how these factors in

turn affect visual strategies

The reception of non-commercial cinema produced by subalterns has

changed somewhat since the 1960s. Given the lack of knowledge about other cin

ema produced in Latin America before

or

since the New Latin American Cinema

movement, and the lack of critical writing on that material, the revival of interest

in the 1960s forefathers furthers the illusion that they are the sole point of origin.

The limitations of international exhibition produce selective canons

and

genealo

gies. The cultural policies

of

the present effect

our

categories and the terms of

debate, as much as those canons to

put

it simply, third cinema is

now

something

quite

different from

what it was

imagined

to be

20 years ago.

And yet this need to

establish a tradition connects

with

a desire, sometimes latent,

sometimes appar

ent, to conceive

of

the aim

of

critical discourse as

the

locating

of

third cinema s

essence in a particular text, or kind of text. Sometimes the evaluation of a fUm s

relation to third cinema relies on the ethnicity and sexuality of the film . director

more so than on addressing third cinema as a network of relationships between

conditions of production, visual strategies, subject matter, audience, and the

larger political context, a network that shifts as the film travels from one place to

another. We get stuck trying to fix the meaning of a text

and

that text to a certain

maker. This kind of enquiry participates in the old, and quite futile ,search for the

truly radical film produced by the truly radical subject which is supposed to

catalyse the truly immanent revolution.

An industrially based creative medium that very often relies on interna

tional investment

and

distribution, and aspires to mass audiences, cannot

be

com

prehensively examined through a critical lens

that

isolates anyone aspect of the

process, from production to reception. Critical discourse around subaltern media

must e able to address the many interrelated areas that the production and

reception of those works bring together. I will bring my presentation to a close y

outlining

what

I perceive to be several of the key issues. The first is the function of

criticism in relation to subaltern cinemas. Several factors have contributed to a

perpetually unstable critical dialogue

on

subaltern film-making in the U S In

general, the status of film criticism has degenerated throughout this decade as the

role of marketing increases, even for independent films, and as grants for critical

writing have disappeared. These present conditions aggravate an already existent

tension concerning the role of the subaltern and / or sympathetic critic in subaltern

film sectors. The history of attitudes and beliefs that have contributed to distrust

of intellectual labour and metaphorical ambiguity, which are apparent in debates

on third world national culture, social realism and political cinema must be ana

lysed. What, we might ask, are the factors that prevent the politically committed

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Fusco, Coco, About locating ourselves and our representations , Framework, 36 (1989) p.7

ticultural

interpolation

another

policies.

How and we must

positioned

by dominant

cultural

called upon to function

as testimonial

to our

stream? Who and what

questions,

we can begin to

of subaltern

works.

How

interpretive

community, for

example,

designa

ted as having

been

targetted

to

a

audience?

How

are different

multicultural

or

to its

when

so

much

subaltern

media

as

opposed to a

in different What

makes ethnicity attractive and marketable at a

particular

moment

such

as ours?

Within this

discussion of

cinematic reception

we

can

situate the

theorisa-

tion

of

subaltern spectatorship and

the of

watching subaltern cinema

these

areas,

while they overlap, are not conlpletely contiguous, third world

cinema rarely if

ever

produced solely for third world Which direc-

tion

can

we

take to prevent ourselves from conceiving of

audience as

a unified

community? How can

we

look at the

promotional

mechanisms around films that

presuppose

or

engineer audiences

into

And within

that field of

ques

tioning,

how can

we

avoid reducing spectatorship to a singular category of

tence?

It would seem that this is the point where the contributions

of feminist

psy

choanalytic criticism

are

most obviously instrumental

and

most clearly limited by

the

isolation

and

priviledging

of gender. The theorisation of

subaltern

spectator

ship,

rather

than replacing one fetishised

term

for another in the equation in this

case

race

for

sexuality),

must

be able

to analyse

how different films draw on

the

psychic resources

of

several experiential How

does a filnl, we must

ask, call

upon

your ethnic

identity,

or your racial identity

or

your

position,

or

your profession,

or

your sexuality

so

as to generate

identification?

What hap-

pens

when one category of your is pit against another?

How

do

questions

of power figure into this problem? there a difference

between the pleasure of the touristic of an outsider

and

the sense of loss or of

misrecognition

of one who overwhelnled by

cultures

that are not his/her own?

What is the psychic

impact

of a nledia

culture

that denies racial and ethnic

difference, and how

does

this

differ

from

one

that fetishises those differences?

How does a film

address

a racially specific spectator? rlow is

the desire

to identify

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Fusco, Coco, About locating ourselves and our representations , Framework, 36 (1989) p.7

T H I I D S C E N A a l o C o c O F u s c o

manipulated

or

directed within a film so as to produce an identification

with

a

desired form of ethnicity? The dilemma of the Black American spectator has,

up

to

now, largely been described as having to choose between denial

of

that which

does not

include you,

and

the pleasure of seeing oneself. And yet, this binarism

does

not

account for certain cultural realities in the

US

Nearly everyone,

at one

point

or

another, is

part

of

the general audience

that

attends mainstream Holly

wood films. It may

be

fashionable

to

speak of ethnic markets

and

marginal

audiences,

but the dearth

of representations of people of colour in mainstream

cinema

hardly

deters

subaltern

audiences from attending. How, then, do

we

begin

to

understand these cross-over acts of spectatorship?

How

can

we

incorporate

psychoanalytic

notions

of

ambivalence

and

of internalised repression

to

under-

.taDd

bow

desire is channelled even

when there s

a concommitant process

of

deNal taking place?

y last

set of questions pertain to subjectivity

in

relation to political cin

ema. The theorisation

of

subjectivity within debates

on

political cinema

and more

specifically

New

Latin American Cinema have demonstrated

underdeveloped

concepts of individual agency

and

desire. It is often assumed that these films

must

be designed

to

create within the spectator a desire to change reality, having'seen

the world differently . This can

be

reduced easily to a mechanical formula - the

spectator sees a film, has a discussion

and

leaves

with

his/her mind changed. The

same tendencies that foreclose discussion of symbolic ambiguity within the filmic

texts also preclude reflection

on

ambivalences

that

inform

and

/ or

emerge

from

one s cinematic encounters. As we begin to understand these ambivalencies,

we

also begin to locate the individual experiences of watching films in a

continuum

of

spectatorial moments

that

impact

on

each other.

What I have attempted

to

indicate through this myriad of questions is

that

a politics of location regarding our film practices involves opening issues for

debate,

rather

than fixating themes

and

works. I

may have

reacted negatively

at

first

to

relating location to subaltern practices because

the

notion of

diaspora and

dislocation have for such a long time functioned as metaphors for post-colonial

experience. One of the effects of diaspora, it seems, is

that

a sense of history,

and

of popular memory have

to

be pieced together with fragments, with

remnants and

with

documents that

we

did not

always produce. We

are not drawing on

unified

traditions,

but

partial objects

and

partial truths. As

we

engage in this critical

historiography

and

theorisation,

we must

remember not

to

believe, as

some would

have it,

that we are

emerging for the first time. Dominant institut ions

did not

ignore subaltern experience before . What changes constantly are the

methods

of

structuring

and

controlling those experiences,

and

the memories of

our individual

and

collective pasts. Cinema fits quite neatly into this project as the most powerful

tool for structuring

our

sense of self

and our

sense of history.

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