Title:
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Revolution and pachakuti : political and indigenous cinema in Bolivia and Colombia
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This thesis focuses on cinema and video made by and about indigenous or subaltern
people and communities in Bolivia and Colombia, and discusses the interaction between
different cultural notions of social change and of aesthetic representation. It centres on
the productions of Jorge Sanjines' Bolivian Ukamau Group, and of Marta Rodriguez's
Fundaci6n Cine Documental in Colombia. Previous studies of these filmmaking
collectives have tended to view them under the banner of either national cinematic
traditions; the artistic and political avant-garde often termed as the 'New Latin
American Cinema'; or a longer history of indigenous film and media. This thesis is
bound by none of these categories, but asks how they overlap, mutually inform and alter
one another. By combining close textual analysis with wider contextual and historical
accounts of the films' production and distribution, it examines the linkages between
aesthetic form, cultural memory and political action.
It thus begins with an account of the national and international circulation of
militant avant-garde indigenista and revolutionary cinema in the 1960s and 1970s,
showing how these groups inserted their work into existing and nascent political and
cultural movements, infrastructures and networks. It discusses how the film collectives'
early works converted existing national tropes of the primitive into potential subjects of
continental revolution. It argues that methodological and textual innovations have
increasingly opened films up to the cultural and political expressions of their
participants, and converted them into fields of intercultural dialogue and debate. It
proposes that even videos made by indigenous people themselves are inevitably
mediated by aesthetic, technological and institutional structures, and considers some of
the strategies that indigenous intellectuals and video-makers have employed in
response. This thesis concludes that the most effective political cinemas have been those
that have acknowledged and gained strength from their own status as mediations
between different political, cultural and ideological spheres; between European-derived
notions of social change (revolution) and Andean ones (pachakuti).
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