New Latin American Cinema Analysis

Among many advocacies contributed to on-going and loosely constituted film movement “New Latin American Cinema” starts from 1960s, the manifesto “Third Cinema” highlighted certain significant traits of film in Latin America. The word “third” does not necessarily refer to the Third World, yet it suggests a particular response to the first and second cinema, namely the mainstream industrial production in Hollywood and European auteur film respectively. These cultural hegemonic countries, such as United States, United Kingdom and France, are also the imperialist enforced neo-colonialism to Latin American countries. In conjunction with the struggle for national and continental autonomy in Latin America, filmmakers endeavour to liberate people from

The neo-colonial cultural hegemony serves as an imperative urge for the indigenous people to rewrite their own history because, as Teshome H. Gaberial puts, “official history tends to arrest the future by means of the past.” (“Third Aesthetics”, 53) In expounding the situation, personal narration turns to be politically significant to rescue the missing part from the official history. In spite of minor and oscillating nature of popular memory, the all-embracing strategy provides valuable perspectives to be archived and survived. In this respect, both of the selected films, The Hour of the Furnaces and The Pearl Button present a subjective narration in documentary film in order to unveil the perspective neglected by the grand history.

The Hour of the Furnaces is divided into three segments with unordinary length in 4 hours and 20 minutes. There is no such solid storyline within these three segments, “Neocolonialism”, “Act for liberation” and “Violence and Liberation”, but a vague climax at the end of each segment. The visual narration follows the point of the view from the cameraperson stimulating a guerrilla soldier who are investigating the countries and pointing his gun, namely, the camera, to the injustice. In expounding the quotation from the revolutionists, the narrator voices over to explicate the historical and social

Patricio Guzmán was forced to exile from Chile and gained support to resuming filmmaking from France and Cuba. The exilic experience serves as an intrinsic urge to search to condemn the tyranny and search for the Chilean identity by looking at the history. Unlike his earlier political oeuvre, Guzmán’s latest film The Pearl Button is a documentary with meticulous script as a fictive literature. The script earns an exceptional award for documentary film of Silver Bear for Best Script in Berlin International Film Festival. The plot unveils the theme layer by layer with poetic language. With the contemplative narration performed by the director, the film draws the connection of astronomy and nature to the discovery of a pearl button, which might be the mere evident in revelation of the massacre history to the Indian and the nostalgic sense of displacement altogether. As Teshome H. Gaberial has raised a concern regarding the danger of an “undue romanticisation” of primitive life. (“Third World”, 32) Indeed, by capturing the astonishing scenery in Chile by using long shot, the cinematography portrays the co-existence of human and nature. The emphasis on the rich nature resource, such as the typography of the longest coastal area with rich