Las emociones en la historia y cultura latinoamericanas / Emotions in Latin American Culture and History
Hotel Villa Condesa, Mexico City
September, 2016
“Color: Technology and Affect in La Cucuracha (1934)”
This paper is part of a project that I am calling “Projections: Latin America on Screen.” My purpose is to trace the ways in which Latin America figures in non-Latin American (that is, primarily Hollywood) film and, perhaps more importantly, to outline a history and theory of film from the perspective of these points at which the cinema takes on latinidad. In other words, I take it as given that when Hollywood (or other non-Latin American cinemas) portrays the region, we learn much more about Hollywood than about the purported object of its representation. As such, I also methodically avoid terms such as “stereotype,” on the basis, first, that of course these films don’t provide us with the “truth” of Latin America or Latin Americans (who would ever think that they did?) and, second, that the mere critique that a medium of representation employs lazy short cuts is itself one of the laziest of short cuts that a critic can employ.
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It is [. . .] no surprise that, to negotiate and explore [the] tension between a realism that merely presents us with what we already (think we) know, and a Real that threatens to overturn and overwhelm it, film-makers have often turned to Latin America. For the region south of the border–so close and yet so far from cinema’s heartland in Southern California–is a space that has historically often been seen as both realer than real and yet somehow fantastical and unworldly. It is full of places where (we are told) affect runs wild, but this is an affect that can still perhaps be contained if it can be marked as indisputably “other.” Never has this dance with difference been more evident than in the film industry’s initial experiments with “true” color in the early 1930s. For it is color, and its ambivalent powers to illuminate but also distract the viewer, that are most closely associated with affect in the history of the cinematic apparatus’s technical development. And Latin America, more than anywhere else, is where Hollywood has sought out the color that brings life to our screens.