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
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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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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
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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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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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