Joanna Page

Introduction: Fiction, Documentary, and Cultural Change in Latin America

There has been a rising interest in recent years in theorizing the similarities and differences between fiction and documentary film, fuelled in part by the growing stature of documentary within academic film criticism. Precisely what it is that divides documentary from fiction, if anything, is a matter of some disagreement. Like most categories and genres, in practice these terms resist definitions, becoming—as Bill Nichols suggests—”a little like our everyday, but unrigorous, distinction between fruits and vegetables.”2 It is nonetheless clear that this distinction, however slippery, has become a significant fulcrum for contemporary controversy over the nature of the relationship between the cinematic sign and its referent.

Digital Mimicry and Visual Tropes: Some Images from Argentina

The accounts of historiography published by Roland Barthes and Hayden White in the 1960s and 1970s exposed the linguistic devices that underlay historiography’s representations and discourses.1 Both embedded in narrative structures, history and fiction were found to resemble one another, as “whatever the differences between their immediate contents (real events and imaginary events, respectively), their ultimate content is the same: the structures of human time.”2 This chapter aims to extend—and at some points, revise—the groundwork laid by Barthes and White in order to focus on specifically visual, rather than linguistic, tropes that may be used to construct a reflexive idea of temporality in films.3 I have taken particular inspiration from Paul Ricoeur’s understanding of the intrinsically reflexive nature of narration and of the mutual borrowings between fictional and historical narratives, adapting his theorizations to embrace film, a medium to which Ricoeur rarely refers in his work. This development is a natural one, given cinema’s emergence at the turn of the century—to borrow Mary Ann Doane’s description—as “a privileged machine for the representation of temporality,” as a result of its “ability to inscribe movement through time.”4

Ethnobiographic Encounters and Interculturalism: New Modes of Reflexivity in Contemporary Documentaries from Argentina

Post-2001 filmmaking in Argentina has seen a marked rise in subjective and reflexive modes of documentary production, together with a renewed interest in representing marginalized subjects. This chapter discusses two films, Huellas y memoria de Jorge Preloran (Fermin Rivera, 2009) and El Etnografo (Ulises Rosell, 2012), which focus on the ethnographer’s work within indigenous communities. Page argues that these films move beyond the familiar postmodern dogma that all knowledge of the other is merely a construction by developing specific modes that may be termed, following Bruno Latour, infrareflexive (rather than metareflexive). Moreover, these films respond to Nestor Garcia Canclini’s call for an emphasis on interculturalism rather than on multiculturalism. They demonstrate that the recent turn toward the subjective and the reflexive need not undermine the power of ethnographic film to stage a genuine encounter with the other.