Dr Charlotte Gleghorn, Chancellor’s Fellow, Hispanic Studies, University of Edinburgh Tuesday 4 of March 2014, 5.00pm, Room 12.18, David Hume Tower Dr Charlotte Gleghorn, Chancellor’s Fellow, Hispanic Studies, University of Edinburgh This research paper addresses the emergence of the category of Indigenous cinema and video in Latin America in relation to earlier performance repertoires and artistic practices. While access to equipment and training is uneven, and there remain limited opportunities available to Indigenous directors and communities to produce films in the region, I argue against the supposition that film and video technology is ‘alien’ to native communities. Such a narrative re-affirms the notion that Indigenous peoples are anti-modern, and neglects not only the influence of resilient oral, theatrical and visual traditions that shape the celluloid or digital mediation of Indigenous storytelling, but also the impact of television and mainstream film, with which many Indigenous filmmakers are familiar. Following world cinema theorist Lúcia Nagib (2006: 34), and drawing on the growing literature on intermediality and pre-cinema in Film Studies, I aim to demonstrate that while the cinema is dated as a medium emerging at the turn of the twentieth century, with video developing even later, techniques such as song, dance, storytelling, painting, ritual and other communicative practices inflect the narrative style of many Indigenous films. By way of example, I will analyse La raíz de la resistencia (Roots of Resistance) (Jorge Montiel/Maikiraalasalii Collective, 2012), a Wayúu feature film from Venezuela, in light of the methodological, temporal and epistemological implications of intermediality for Indigenous film and video production. This article was published on 2024-08-13
