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).