CINE EN EMERGENCIA: NATIONAL IDENTITY IN POST-DICTATORIAL
AUDIOVISUAL PRODUCTION IN PARAGUAY
by
Eva Karene Romero
_____________________
A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the
DEPARTMENT OF SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
For the Degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
WITH A MAJOR IN SPANISH
In the Graduate College
THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
2012
2
THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
GRADUATE COLLEGE
As members of the Dissertation Committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation
prepared by Eva Karene Romero
entitled Cine en Emergencia: National Identity in Post-dictatorial Audiovisual Production
in Paraguay
and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the
Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
_______________________________________________________________________ Date:
04/23/12
Dr. Laura Gutiérrez
_______________________________________________________________________ Date:
04/23/12
Dr. Laura Briggs
_______________________________________________________________________ Date:
04/23/12
Dr. Abraham Acosta
Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the Candidate’s
submission of the final copies of the dissertation to the Graduate College.
I hereby certify that I have read this dissertation prepared under my direction and
recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement.
________________________________________________ Date: 04/23/12
Dissertation Director: Dr. Laura Gutiérrez
3
STATEMENT BY AUTHOR
This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for an
advanced degree at the University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library
to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library.
Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided
that accurate acknowledgment of source is made. Requests for permission for extended
quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by
the head of the major department or the Dean of the Graduate College when in his or her
judgment the proposed use of the material is in the interests of scholarship. In all other
instances, however, permission must be obtained from the author.
SIGNED: Eva Karene Romero
4
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This dissertation project is a result of my academic preparation and research completed
during both the MA program and the PhD program in the Department of Spanish and
Portuguese at the University of Arizona.
I would like to thank all of my professors and fellow graduate students for their
contributions to my intellectual growth, both inside and outside of the classroom. I would
especially like to thank my dissertation committee: Laura Gutiérrez, Laura Briggs and
Abraham Acosta and fellow-students Lucy Blaney-Liable, Andy Guzmán, Andrew Rajca,
Olimpia Rosenthal and Jamie Wilson. I would also like to thank the peers and friends
who took part in our Dissertation Support Group: Rosario Hall, Roberto Mendoza,
Elizabeth Phillips, Maisa Taha and Wasilia Yapur.
I also cannot go without thanking the following people, whose support, loving kindness,
help, encouragement and labor have all gone into this project in one way or another:
Carlos, Alba, Adriana, Andy and Victoria Valdovinos, thank you for welcoming me into
your home and family every time I return to Paraguay. Lidia, Isabel and Elba, thank you
for feeding me, washing my clothes, cleaning my room and helping me with Guaraní
translations. Sonia, Rosanna, and Norita Bruke, thank you for being there for me, primas.
Mario Franco, Hugo Biedermann, Belén Herrero, and Belén Perez nuestro amor va más
allá del tiempo-espacio. Aníbal Ríos, Mariana Vázquez, Fredi Casco, Marcelo Martinessi,
Paulo Meileke, Patricia Aguayo, Paz Encina, Renate Costa, Juan Carlos Maneglia, Tana
Schémbori, Ramiro Gómez, Manuel Cuenca, Claudia Rojas, Hugo Cataldo, Agusto Netto,
Pablo Lamar thank you for sharing your knowledge with me. Thank you to those who
attended conferences, institutes and talks that helped shape my work, particularly Laura
Gronewold, Marlowe Daly-Galeano, Araceli Masterson, Rafael Climent-Espino, and
everyone who attended the Tepoztlán Institute for the Transnational History of the
Americas 2011. Thank you to Guillermo Martínez-Sotelo for assisting me with my
understanding of soccer rules.
Endless thanks to Andrew Haberbosch for so much support that I could not begin to
describe it here.
5
DEDICATORIA
A tod@s l@s paraguay@s
6
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................................ 7 INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................. 8 On the (Trans)national Frame ............................................................................................. 8 Locating Paraguayan Film ................................................................................................ 14 Points of Departure ........................................................................................................... 17 Contributions to the Field ................................................................................................. 19 Overview of Chapters ....................................................................................................... 21 CHAPTER 1: FROM DICTATORSHIP TO DEMOCRACY? FROM LITERATURE TO
FILM? ............................................................................................................................... 25 Latin American Film Studies and the Nation ................................................................... 25 Historical Contextualization: A Particular History of Dictatorship .................................. 39 ¿Qué es el audiovisual? ..................................................................................................... 49 Paraguayidad ..................................................................................................................... 52 A History of Audiovisual Production in Paraguay and the Foreign/Male Gaze............... 61 CHAPTER 2: HAMACA PARAGUAYA: BETWEEN RESISTANCE… ......................... 69 Hamaca’s Formal Resistance ............................................................................................ 75 Representation as The Counting of Those Who Don’t Count .......................................... 83 A Record of Violence ....................................................................................................... 87 The Mechanics of Allegory, Mourning and Temporal Marks .......................................... 90 Allegory and Gender ......................................................................................................... 94 Noche Adentro .................................................................................................................. 95 Karai Norte...................................................................................................................... 100 CHAPTER 3: … AND ITS IMPOSSIBILITY............................................................... 105 The Campesino Protagonist and the Rural Space ........................................................... 105 Temporalization, Racialization, and Gendering ............................................................. 115 CHAPTER 4: FRANKFURT: AUTHENTICITY, TRANSNATIONALITY,
HISTORICAL BORDER WARDS AND GLOBAL NEOLIBERAL CAPITALISM .. 127
“Authenticity” and Transnationality ............................................................................... 127 Frankfurt ......................................................................................................................... 136 Historical Border Wars and Contemporary Global Neoliberal Capitalism .................... 143 The Market, the State and the Church ............................................................................ 148 Melancholia and Politics ................................................................................................. 156 Affect and Structures of Feeling ..................................................................................... 158 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................... 166 Summary of the Study………………………………………………………………….166
Methodology……………………………………………………………………………169
Major Findings………………………………………………………………………….171
Conclusions and Implications ......................................................................................... 182 REFERENCES ............................................................................................................... 185 7
ABSTRACT
“Cine en Emergencia: National Identity in Post-dictatorial Audiovisual
Production in Paraguay,” is an academic study of narrative and documentary film from
Paraguay. Cinematic production in Paraguay has “boomed” only with the last decade in
part due to the censorship of the long-standing Stroessner regime and in part because new
digital technologies have made audiovisual production more accessible.
This study explores the dominance of a particular essentialized national identity
in narrative and documentary film in Paraguay. This iconic protagonist and space (the
campesino in the rural setting) is not the site of “true Paraguayan authenticity,” but rather,
the product of competing national and transnational forces. Inside Paraguay, rural icons
become the grounds from which to express political resistance and frustration with the
status quo. Outside of Paraguay—particularly in the European power center of film
festivals, funding and awards—a homogeneous and uncontested set of representations of
national identity becomes the paradigm that satisfies the “first world” need to essentialize
and orientalize the “third world.”
In the introduction I make my methodology clear, stressing that I am focusing my
critical apparatus on circulating discourse regarding what it means to be a citizen of that
Paraguay. I also grapple with the difficulty of dealing with a film archive that is
classified as national while trying to dislodge the national frame as the paradigm for
analysis and provide a problematization of the relationship between film and nation that
has been so widely and uncritically accepted. In Chapter 1 I provide a historical
contextualization for the relationship between film and the nation and provide important
details in regards to the history of the moving image in Paraguay. In Chapter 2 I explore
Hamaca Paraguaya’s (2006) potential for resistance through formal subversion,
historical revisionism, self-reflexivity and political denunciation. Using a double-register,
in Chapter 3 I describe the transnational power structure as a palimpsest against which
Paraguayan film is necessarily constructed and how this bleeds through into Hamaca as a
cultural product. In Chapter 4 I analyze Frankfurt (2006) as a documentary that creates
parallels between Paraguay’s historical border wars and present-day global neoliberal
capitalism.
8
INTRODUCTION
My father is from Paraguay and I was raised there. Whenever I came back to the
United States (where I was born) and told people “I live in Paraguay,” no one knew
where or what I was talking about. In fact, most of the times I heard Paraguay mentioned
in the U.S. media, it was a stand-in for “a place no one has ever heard of.” Paraguay’s
history of dictatorship, isolation, geography and size could all be cited to explain its
invisibility. Having not had much of a film history, no one would have even seen a film
shot in Paraguay—until now.
When friends1 began their involvement in the production of narrative and
documentary film in Paraguay, I paid attention. Who was involved? What would these
“early” films look like? What would they be about? Could I watch them? Who else
would watch them, and how? What would people think about Paraguay when they
watched them? These simple questions were my point of departure.
On the (Trans)national Frame
As a student interested in transnational studies, my first problem was: how do I
write about film specifically from Paraguay without privileging the national frame? I see
transnationalism as a category of analysis that does not privilege the perceived fixity of
1
My dear old friend, Roberto Andrés Valdovinos, was doing audio production for Tierra Roja (2006) when
I started discussing possible ideas for this dissertation with him. I thank him for bringing Paraguayan film
projects to my attention that I, at that time, otherwise would have known nothing about. Since then my
research has come to encompass works authored by people other than my personal friends, of course.
9
the national frame, but rather, resists the tradition of making the nation the framework
from which things can be studied. Transnationalism should always depart from the
assumption of nationalism as ideology. As an approach, it must integrate an
acknowledgement of the force of nationalism, imperialist aggression and their linkage
with capitalist formation. Transnationalism involves actively visibilizing the moments of
slippage that reveal how the nation is always contested and shot through with
contradictions. 2
Take for example the work of Gareth Williams in The Other Side of the Popular.
He argues that the transition from the national to the postnational involves a re-definition
of the nation, and not its demise, as some scholars such as Arjun Appadurai have
postulated.3 This change in the way scholars understand the nation coincides with a
change of focus. Leftist revolutions (Nicaraguan, Mexican, Cuban) were the site of hope
for the nation's “coming into its own” to borrow a phrase from Ranajit Guha, but this
desire was never fulfilled. Why? Theorists shifted towards a study of global accumulation
in order to approach an answer. It became evident that foundationalism and totalizing
narratives would no longer work to think about Latin America after transition.
The transition from national to postnational requires a change of frame in which
the nation can no longer be the primary referent for scholars who desire a
counterhegemonic approach. Conceptualizations of the nation require a pairing of
economic and cultural frameworks. Upon studying how the structure of the nation is
2
See Briggs, McCormick and Way’s “Transnationalism: a Category of Analysis.”
Appadurai, Arjun (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press.
3
10
related to the universal development of capitalism, theorists such as Williams point out
that the formation of the modern nation-state was necessary for global capitalist flows
that present themselves as intrinsic to uneven accumulation and perpetuation of global
poverty under neoliberalism.
My interest has always been to talk about how discourses on the national function
in tandem with the market through cultural products. What better cultural product with
which to explore discourses on the nation than film? The relationship between the nation
and film has been widely and uncritically accepted, according to Vitali and Willemen,
much in the same way the nation itself has been widely and uncritically accepted as its
own category of analysis. In their book, Theorising National Cinema, they go on to
describe how “‘foreign-ness’ was foisted upon . . . films by competitors as [they] sought
to monopolise a market by defining it as a ‘national’ one. . . . xenophobia was mobilized
against certain competitors to drive them out of a geopolitically bounded market” (1). In
order for film companies to achieve a monopoly, they needed to first develop and unify a
national market. The relationship between nation and film was in fact forged by the
market. Ana López also writes about how:
[I]n Latin America, the importance of nationality in the cinema has been a
hotly debated issue almost since the birth of cinema. In the face of what has
always been perceived as the dominating and stifling presence of other
cultures and ideologies, the cinema was identified early on as a crucial site for
the utopian assertion of a collective unity identified as the nation. (141)
11
Therein lays a question: if national film was in fact forged by the market, can it possibly
operate in favor of oppressed classes (such as the rural poor) in name of “the collective
unity identified as the nation” or has cultural analysis proven that no relationship forged
by the market can meaningfully work toward reversing the order of the market? Can
nationalism be operationalized in favor of equality and redistribution? Vitali and
Willemen go on to describe how:
The most common way of forestalling questions about the ways in which
economic arrangements shape cultural issues and modes of thinking, while
appearing to solve the problem of that interaction, has been to invoke the
metaphor of the national body and its organic formation in a myth-like
‘natural’ past. (2)
In light of this concept, I find it is absolutely necessary for any scholar taking national
film as the object of study to explore ways in which the nation is represented by film as
the natural result of an evolutionary trajectory and how that representation is related to
economic arrangements. To write about film history using essentializing views of
national cultural formations is to be complicit with the market.
So why pair film and nation at all? Vitali and Willamen’s words are helpful for
addressing this question:
[C]inema can be thought of as pertaining to a national configuration because films,
far from offering cinematic accounts of ‘the nation’ as seen by the coalition that
sustains the forces of capital within any given nation, are clusters of historically
specific cultural forms the semantic modulations of which are orchestrated and
12
contended over by each of the forces at play in a given geographical territory. . . .
films can be seen not to ‘reflect’ but to ‘stage’ the historical conditions that
constitute ‘the national’ and, in the process, to ‘mediate’ the socio-economic
dynamics that shape cinematic production, along with the other production sectors
governed by national industrial regulation and legislation. (8)
Indeed, ignoring the specificity of a given nation and how it particularly sustains the
forces of capital would be to disavow the conditions that create inequality, much in the
way the terms “postracial” and “postfeminist” do. Ignoring the nation would not strip it
of its power, but rather, would obscure its power by placing it under erasure. Any
scholarship that attempts to ignore the nation would inevitably be haunted by the nation
in other ways that it would not be able to account for.
How then to responsibly account for national cinema? In his chapter in Theorising
National Cinema, “History, Textuality, Nation: Kracauer, Burch and Some Problems in
the Study of National Cinemas,” Philip Rosen defines national cinema as “a large group
of films, a body of textuality. This body of textuality is usually given a certain amount of
historical specificity by calling it a national cinema. This means that issues of national
cinema revolve around an intertextuality to which one attributes certain historical weight”
(17). In the case of Paraguayan film, to account for the national also requires accounting
for the transnational. I insist that Paraguayan culture has been historically criss-crossed
by “foreign” influences, and the Paraguayan tradition includes transformative integrations
of many “foreign” practices. As Rosen states “. . . the intermediate and open term
‘transnational’ acknowledges the persistent agency of the state . . . At the same time, the
13
prefix ‘trans-‘ implies relations of unevenness and mobility” (x). Through the case-study
represented by Paraguayan film, I find myself asserting that every national approach must
also be a transnational one in order to adequately account for the nation.
In the case of Latin American film, perhaps this need is even more urgent. As
Andrew Higson makes clear in “The Limiting Imagination of a National Cinema,” “The
cinemas established in specific nation-states are rarely autonomous cultural industries and
the film business has long operated on a regional, national and transnational basis” (67).
The historically transnational movements of finance capital, films and film-makers are
only intensified today with modern digital technologies and the internet. “[S]pecific
transactions and interconnections are part and parcel of the history of Latin American
cinemas” (Noriega, xiv).
I decided to take on the “national” in film from a very specific angle: that of
national identity. This approach involves analyzing discourses on the nation that have
been and/or are in circulation. This does not involve turning my critical apparatus on
Paraguay as some sort of isolated whole. In fact, I am not certain how or if that could be
done in any effective way. When I look at nationalistic discourses, I do so not only to talk
about Paraguay, but more broadly, to shed a light on nationalism as it has been
manufactured as a “problem” for the “developing” world. Willemen describes
nationalism as such in The Third Cinema Question:
In fact, the West invented nationalism, initially in the form of imperialism as
nation-states extended their domination over others, creating at one and the same
time the hegemonic sense of the “national culture” and the “problem” of national
14
identity for the colonized territories. The issue of national cultural identity arises
only in response to a challenge posed by the other, so that any discourse of
national-cultural identity is always and from the outset oppositional, although not
necessarily conducive to progressive positions. (239)
Let it be understood that when I write about Paraguay here, I write about it as a collection
of discourses that are forged and bounded by a public sphere “… as the public debate that
gives the nation meaning, and [as] media systems with a particular geographical reach
that give it shape. . .” When I say Paraguay, I am not limiting myself to that which exists
within the geopolitical borders of the nation, but rather, I am including the discourses of
“the diasporic communities, uprooted from the specific geo-political space of the nation
or the homeland, [that] still share a common sense of belonging, despite—or even
because of—their transnational dispersal” (Higson, 64). How could I exclude such voices?
The loudest of them, in this work, is my own. In the words of Néstor García Canclini,
“...identity, as a narrative we constantly reconstruct with others, is also a coproduction.”
(xv), and to that I would add, a co-production that takes place on both sides of national
geopolitical borders.
Locating Paraguayan Film
Although virtually nothing has been written about Paraguayan film, Latin
American Cinema at large has been written about extensively. In Chapter 1 I review the
academic literature that has been written specifically about Latin American cinema and
its relationship to the nation. This research demonstrates how film, the nation and the
15
market have direct, economically-driven relationships. Scholars have also described
Hollywood’s role in Latin American film; in some instances Hollywood constitutes a
model, while in others, it is exactly what “Third Cinema” should seek to rebel against.
Politically-influenced manifestos from the 60s, 70s and 80s sought to give film in Latin
America a particular direction, purpose and aesthetic. Since then, scholars have pointed
out the problems with approaches that were embraced as the darlings of these manifestos,
such as emphasis on nationalism and realism: “the nation” is more equitable with the
market than with the people; “realism” is more equitable with ways of seeing than what is
seen. Today, Ana López writes about “New New Latin American Cinema” which
arguably does less to subvert Hollywood and more to compete with it for box office
profits. How does Paraguayan film, now showing, fit in (or not fit in) to these equations?
How does the new production of narrative and documentary film in Paraguay
construct, maintain and challenge discourses surrounding paraguayidad? How do
representations of national identity and citizenship intersect with representations of class,
gender, and race that could fracture any sort of homogeneity? What are the recurrent
stories that Paraguayan film tells about Paraguayans and their history? How is national
identity constructed in particular global conditions (i.e. neoliberal capitalism) and
particular local conditions (i.e. post-dictatorship) and how do these relate to the changing
role of the nation-state? What is nationalism in Paraguayan film a response to?
“Development discourse?” What is the meaning of historical border wars as a referent for
present day audiovisual production in Paraguay?
16
In this dissertation I analyze the national/transnational context, form and content
of an archive of narrative and documentary film in Paraguay. This analysis illuminates
the economic lives of cultural products produced in an effort to define national identity,
revealing that these cultural products do not represent a preexisting, assumed nation, but
rather, rely on identitarian politics to construct the very discourse that is the nation. Here
national identity maintains a national and transnational imbalance of power and uneven
distribution of wealth. Through my analytical process I demonstrate how cultural voids in
Paraguay are filled with an apparent hypernationalism that under scrutiny is not evidence
of any national essence, but is rather another face of transnational capital.
There is no nation beyond discourse. But there are people. And another result of
this cultural process I call Paraguayan film is a negation of the very difference on which
global capital depends through a Paraguayan disidentification with a discourse on
modernity in the Latin American context, development discourse and perceived
parameters of progress. Paraguayan film simultaneously reifies difference and reveals the
fallacy of difference.
In order to explore these concepts I have watched most short, feature-length
narrative and documentary films produced between 2000 and 2011 by Paraguayan
directors. I have paid special attention to dominant trends in films that have participated
at international film festivals. I try to address these trends by writing specifically about
the following films: Hamaca Paraguaya (2006), Noche Adentro (2009), Karai Norte
(2011), and Frankfurt (2008). I also write tangentially about Soberania Violada (2007).
17
Points of Departure
“Why study film?” is a valid question, and one I hear often being that my degree
is in Hispanic Literature. Canclini’s words are helpful for illustrating a response:
This literary gaze at patrimony, including visual culture, contributed to the
divorce between the elites and the people. In societies with a high rate of illiteracy,
documenting and organizing culture chiefly through written means is a way of
reserving memory and the use of symbolic goods for the few…Being cultured has
implied repressing the visual dimension in our perceptive relationship with the
world and inscribing its symbolic elaboration in a written record. (94-95)
Augusto Roa Bastos has long been upheld as “the father of Paraguayan culture” due to
his success as a boom writer. The issue is, his brilliant post-modern, multilingual
masterpiece, Yo El Supremo, has hardly been read by anyone, Paraguayan or otherwise.
Even academics shy away from writing about it due to its postmodern form and linguistic
challenges. Especially in a society with a high rate of illiteracy, access to said novel is
limited, and in the way Canclini describes, its cultural value is heightened by its status as
a symbolic good for the few.
As I discuss in Chapter 1, Paraguay is still haunted by dictatorship’s penchant for
squelching ideas, creativity and critical thought. “Culture” is still seen as something for
the elite, that may mark status but otherwise has little practical value. Paraguayan film,
in contrast with literature, is a form that is much more accessible for the masses,
particularly now since the birth of TV Pública Paraguay in 2011, which is dedicated in
18
great part to broadcasting audiovisual pieces produced in Paraguay. The political
movement away from the Stroessner regime and its remaining structure and the parallel
rise of a more accessible form of “culture” in Paraguay is not merely a coincidence.
Rey Chow’s study of Chinese cinema, Primitive Passions, has been hugely
influential for this dissertation, and in many ways this work takes her radical assumptions
as its point of departure. One of those assumptions has to do with why film is important:
From the perspective of the world at large, film shares with other institutions such
as museums and art galleries the important function of exhibiting ethnic cultures.
But while museums and art galleries are still bound to specific locales, film is not.
Film therefore serves as a major instrument for making the visuality of exotic
cultures part of our everyday mediatized experience around the globe. Because of
this, film belongs as much with diciplines such as anthropology and ethnography
as it does with literature, women’s studies, sociology and media studies. (27)
Film’s unbound transnationality recalls Gaytri Spivak’s words on the “errancy” of rumor
in “Deconstructing Historiography.” Film seems to have greater possibility for moments
of substitution of the signification-function of signs that are already in broad circulation;
even signs that have been put in circulation by the state or finance capital. In Spivak’s
words, rumors are “errant, illegitimate, and accessible to the subaltern.” Similarly, the
space between a visual text and its reception opens up more possibilities for more savage
constructions of meaning that feed back into the way we make sense of the globe,
especially in the case of geographies that may otherwise be unknown.
19
Contributions to the Field
In the process of this project certain critical and theoretical points have developed
in my mind as central “emergencies”: particular points that I have since classified as my
radical assumptions or points of departure, the answers to the “so what?” question of my
work. I believe they deserve further attention in contemporary cultural criticism as it
moves forward. Here I categorize them by the fields that they may impact most
specifically: Visual Studies: images that neatly place “third world natives” in their
“proper frames” lay claims to “modernity” (meaning development and enlightenment) by
having taken a “subaltern term” (toward the underprivileged) but are more accurately
described as products of cultural hegemony. Cultural Studies: 1. a cultural studies
analysis must add temporality to the axis of social structure inclusive of race, class and
gender; power relations are integrally linked to how peoples, places and products are
related to the past, present or future, and how that relates to their race, gender, nationality
and "ranking" in the evolutionist-Enlightenment notion of progress. 2. the transnationality
and political economy of film production must be analyzed with regards to power
structures implicit in funding mechanisms and how these echo historical colonial
relationships. Film Studies: A study of a national body of film must investigate the forces
at play in the conditions of cinematic production in order to shed light on why nationality
is treated like a genre (vs. horror, drama, comedy, etc.). Latin American Studies: In the
case of Paraguay, national identity is formulated in such a way that directly contributes to
20
ideologies that help justify/explain away radically unequal distribution of wealth and
power.
It is also important to mention that this is a comprehensive work on a new field
that has not received serious scholarly consideration. No scholarly works have been
published on the topic of audiovisual production in Paraguay through the U.S. academy.
This work is the first in-depth cultural analysis of the field that fills a void in the field of
Latin American film studies. While over the past decade in the United States there has
been an upsurge in academic work on Latin American film production from countries
other than the big four (Argentina, Brazil, Cuba and Mexico), none of this work involves
Paraguayan film. My research addresses this specific lack.
Another goal of this study is to build upon critical theorizations produced on
representation and national identity in audiovisual production in Latin America. I go
beyond the scope of traditional film studies and Latin American studies to produce work
that gets to the core of profound theoretical exploration integrating economic,
transnational, visual, cultural and feminist theory contextualized within a specific
moment of local and global transition: the present.
Putting the aforementioned audiovisual products and theoretical bodies into
dialogue allows me to not only identify slippages and traces produced in the process of
mediating ideology in regard to national identity, but also in regard to the theoretical
tools circulating in the academy and currently implemented for this kind of exploration.
21
Overview of Chapters
“Chapter 1: From Dictatorship to Democracy? From Literature to Film?” provides
a review of studies that explore the relationship between Latin American film, the nation
and national identity. It also explores some categorizations of the types of relationships
that exist between national cinema and Hollywood. It reviews film manifestos from the
1960s, 70s and 80s and scholarship that demonstrates problems with certain aspects of
the goals of those manifestos and what following them actually produces. The
revolutionary politics behind the manifestos and their complicity with the market are
explored.
Chapter 1 also provides a brief historical contextualization of the Paraguayan
transition from dictatorship to so-called democracy and the coinciding transition from
literature (or void?) to film as the referent for thought defining the nation. In this chapter
I also identify certain historical and contemporary discourses regarding dictatorship and
the arts in Paraguay.
In this chapter I explain that the 35 year Stroessner dictatorship in Paraguay
concluded with Andrés Rodriguez’s coup d’état of 1989, however, the process of
apertura social (socio-cultural and artistic change in public discourse) was slow to take
hold. From teachers to taxi drivers, many speculate that this is due to the fact that every
president elected after the coup had close ties to the dictatorship until Nicanor Duarte’s
election in 2003. Unfortunately, most concur that Duarte’s presidency was a monumental
disappointment: more of the same cronyism and corruption of the past. When left-leaning
22
Fernando Lugo was elected in 2008, the mood was optimistic again: for the first time
since 1948 a non-member of the Colorado party had risen to power.
Chapter 1 also provides some context regarding what it means to be a filmmaker
in Paraguay today. It explores discourses of paraguayidad and citizenship while asking
what are the constraints and guarantees of participation in Asunción’s society? How do
these effect filmmaking?
Additionally, Chapter 1 includes a brief theorization of the effect of the “foreign
gaze” in Paraguay being structured like the “male gaze” is structured in Laura Mulvey’s
foundational text, “Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema.”
“Chapter 2: Hamaca Paraguaya: Between Resistance…” analyzes the
national/transnational context, form and content of Un Certain Regard winner of Cannes
2006, Hamaca Paraguaya, widely recognized as the “before and after” marker par
excellence of Paraguayan film: the film that showed young directors that a Paraguayan
film could “be successful” on international screens. In the third chapter, however, I also
demonstrate the problems with this film’s success in its entrenchment within a cultural,
economic and political system reliant on binaristic and hierarchical identitarian politics:
the building blocks of the very discourses that maintain national and transnational
imbalances of power and wealth.
I use Hamaca Paraguaya as my foremost example not only because of the film’s
status, but also because of how it exemplifies several dominant trends in Paraguayan film:
setting the story in the rural space, campesino protagonism, Guaraní dialogue, a focus on
loss as the historical referent.
23
In Chapter 2 I explore Hamaca Paraguaya’s (2006) potential for resistance
through formal subversion (slowness, silence, absence), historical revisionism, selfreflexivity and political denunciation. I also use Idelber Avelar’s The Untimely Present,
Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning to explore connections
between allegory, mourning, temporal marks and gender. Specifically in my exploration
of allegory and gender, I bring in two short films, Noche Adentro (2010) directed by
Pablo Lamar and Karai Norte (2009) directed by Marcelo Martinessi.
Chapter 3:” …And its impossibility” follows Chapter 2 in a double-register.
Chapter 3 describes the transnational power structure as a palimpsest against which
Paraguayan film is necessarily constructed and how this bleeds through into Hamaca as a
cultural product. It explores the potential problems with how the mestizo campesino
protagonist par excelance of Paraguayan film is represented—an argument that extends
itself into a discussion of the “right place” of cinemas of the “third world” and film
festivals of the “first world.” This chapter relies heavily upon the work of Rey Chow in
her book, Primitive Passions. Chapter 3 also includes a section entitled “Temporalization,
Racialization and Gendering” which explores the problematic marriage of otherness,
identity, the past, race, nature and development discourse through certain
conceptualizations of Walter Benjamin, Anne McClintock, Franz Fanon, Stuart Hall,
Sigmund Freud, and Anne Cheng.
Chapter 4: “Frankfurt: Authenticity/Transnationality, Historical Border
Wars/Global Neoliberal Capitalism” argues that the preoccupation with cultural
“authenticity” in Paraguayan film can be read as the trace of the transnational nature of
24
film production; authenticity/transnationality enter into a double bind. Chapter 4 analyzes
Frankfurt (2006) in light of this, and also as a documentary that creates parallels between
Paraguay’s historical border wars and the effects of present-day global neoliberal
capitalism. I also explore Frankfurt’s ambiguity frente a the relationship between the
market, the state and the church. I include a discussion on what melancholia may mean
for politics in Paraguayan film. Finally, I explore what Frankfurt represents about how
affect operates through nacionalismo futbolero, producing specific results along racial
lines and with specific market effects, a reading in which I rely on Lauren Berlant and
Jesús Martín-Barbero.
25
CHAPTER 1: FROM DICTATORSHIP TO DEMOCRACY? FROM
LITERATURE TO FILM?
Latin American Film Studies and the Nation
This is a dissertation about audiovisual production in Paraguay, but more
specifically, it is a study that seeks to de-center the national frame in current critical
discourse, challenging assumptions about what a nation is, what its relationship to “its
people” is and how “national” identity is constructed in cultural history and film studies.
In this dissertation I examine the relationship between the nation and film, while asking
how this relationship became so widely and uncritically accepted and while examining
what this relationship actually does.
Paraguayan film, both narative and documentary, in particular represents a special
opportunity for exploring the relationship between nation and film given the small size of
its production, the dominance of national symbols within this archive and current debates
about what the role, purpose and direction of Paraguayan film should be.
Existing scholarship on Latin American Cinema explores the historic relationship
between film and nation. In Theorising National Cinema, editors Valentina Vitali and
Paul Willemen demonstrate how film, the market and nationalism have direct,
economically motivated relationships. Historically, in order for film companies to
achieve a monopoly, they needed to first develop and unify a national market. While
many theorizations of the nation are currently in circulation, the most commonly
activated in transnational Latin American film scholarship are theorizations that take the
26
nation to be an “imagined community” along the lines of Benedict Anderson. In “The
National Revisited,” Willemen describes the nation as “a bounded geographical space
that a particular powerbloc, in this case a coalition that constitutes a national bourgeoisie,
can reasonably expect to restructure to its own benefit on a long-term basis” (29). Vitali
and Willemen also note that the most common way of obscuring the manner in which
economic relationships affect cultural issues at the level of production and consumption
has been to invoke the “the metaphor of the national body and its organic formation in a
myth-like ‘natural’ past” (2). This puts us at a starting point where the assumption is that
the nation is imagined and usually activated rhetorically in order to benefit the
bourgeoisie economically.
That said, even though the national, like the racial, may not materially “exist” it is
dominantly regarded as if it does. In “Framing National Cinemas” by Susan Hayward,
she states that “[t]he fact that these discursive concepts of the nation are based in a
‘fictional’ representation of the nation does not mean that they do not have real effects”
(99). More specifically, as Vitali and Willemen might put it, the “nation” does exist
when defined as the confluence of forces that sustain capital through historically specific
cultural forms at work in a particular geographic territory. Therefore, it is of utmost
importance that film not be studied as a reflection of what constitutes the national, but
rather, as a mediation of socio-economic dynamics taking place in the name of the
national.
In “Vector, Flow, Zone: toward a history of cinematic translation,” Nataša
Durovicová describes how cinema has always provided an ideal representational scale for
27
the nation-state and goes as far as to say that. “. . . it is still today nearly impossible to
imagine a state unless it can cast its own cinematic projection nationale” (92). She points
out that before sound was developed for film in the late 1920s, many nation-states had
already begun actively drafting cinematic production for “national service.” Films were
already being conceptualized simultaneously as commercial products and evidence of
national cultural uniqueness. Durovicová sees traces of this legacy in the fact that:
At the US local Blockbuster video store, ‘Foreign’ is now, for better and
worse, a genre-like category alongside ‘Drama’ or ‘Sci-Fi,’ a recalibration
still largely unthinkable in the US theatrical distribution and exhibition
system, where the alignment ‘foreign=translation=art’ for better part of the
twentieth century succeeded in establishing a negative borderline of
visibility for the world’s movies. (107)
In “Early Cinema and Modernity in Latin America” Ana López also points out an
“obsessive concern with nationness” specific to early Latin American cinema, proposing
that perhaps an explanation could come by way of the fact that the majority of early
filmmakers were first generation immigrants. I would postulate, however, that perhaps it
was not the first-generation immigrants who linked film with the nation, but rather, they
were simply attracted to what was already there: an aesthetic form that was well-suited
for representing “the nation.”
To speak of the market, the nation and cinema, it is necessary to speak of
Hollywood as Stephen Crofts points out in “Reconceptualizing National Cinema/s”: “As
Hollywood sets the terms of national cinemas’ self marketing, so too does its market
28
power and pervasive ideology of entertainment limit the circulation of national cinemas”
(52). Crofts points out how at the moment when cinemas from outside the United States
become national, (which arguably they always already are), they necessarily require
specialist exhibit circuits distinct from those of Hollywood—circuits such as art house
cinemas, film festivals, specialist television slots and other rarer types of exhibition
modes such as community, workplace and campus screenings.
Crofts categorizes national cinemas into the following relationships with
Hollywood:
1) cinemas which differ from Hollywood, but do not compete directly,
by targeting a distinct, specialized market sector;
2) those which differ, do not compete directly but do directly critique
Hollywood;
3) European and Third World entertainment cinemas which struggle
against Hollywood with limited or no success;
4) cinemas which ignore Hollywood, an accomplishment managed by
few;
5) Anglophone cinemas which try to beat Hollywood at its own game;
6) cinemas which work within a wholly state-controlled and often
substantially state subsidized industry; and
7) regional or national cinemas whose culture and/or language take their
distance from the nation-states which enclose them. (44-45)
29
In the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, particularly the 1940s and early 1950s, Mexican
film was successfully placing a dent in Hollywood’s revenues in Mexico. However, by
the sixties, certain Latin American Cinemas were also defining themselves against the
Hollywood model. The concept was to, in a way, “forget” about the market and pick up
social responsibility as a motivation instead. In a direct critique of Hollywood’s glamour
and fantasy, realism was upheld as the guiding light of Latin American film. Even the
aesthetic and technique of Hollywood were seen as facets of film to counter; using the
technology available in “the third world” meant different results. “Alternative” cinema
arose with what was called “author cinema” and the demand that filmmakers be free to
express themselves in non-standard film language. Since this cinema was conceptualized
as a social service of sorts, it was seen as congruous that it should be state-subsidized.
All of the previous observations come directly from a reading of New Latin
American cinema through the revolutionary goals of manifestos from the 60s, 70s and
80s. Take for example the manifestos of Fernando Birri. Birri was born and raised in
Argentina after his parents emigrated from Italy. He studied at the Centro sperimentale di
cinematografia in Rome and was highly influenced by Italian Neorealism. He founded the
Escuela Documental de Santa Fe with the mission of depicting “Third World” national
identities with “realism”—the task for New Latin American Cinema. It was, he thought,
an inherently revolutionary goal, because it abandoned the fantasy and glamour of
Hollywood cinema and focused on the problems and struggles of “ordinary” people. One
of Birri’s main goals was to break with commercial cinema by incorporating new
working-class and peasant audiences in order to achieve what he thought would be a
30
more democratic cultural practice. Birri’s goals became the goals of Latin American
Cinema as Birri became an icon and achieved founding father status. After the downfall
of Arturo Frondizi4 and the ensuing military censorship, Birri found himself escaping to
Brazil, then Italy, then Cuba,5 finally “reincarnated as the ‘pope’ of the new Latin
American cinema” as John King puts it in Magical Reels: A History of Cinema in Latin
America (85).6
In “Cinema and Underdevelopment” (1962) Birri stresses the concept of
concientización or pro-people consciousness awakening. He uses words like “antibourgeois,” “anti-colonial,” and “anti-imperialist” to define the mission of Latin
American Film and to describe the struggle against Hollywood cinematic monopoly. Birri
also calls for governments to adopt protectionist measure to guarantee the distribution
and exhibition of Latin American film: “[I]n the same way that a government can cancel
an oil contract so, for the same reasons of the social good and with the same authority,
that same government can and should regulate the prejudicial cultural and economic
exploitation that comes with the uncontrolled flow of foreign films into its territory” (91).
4
Arturo Frondizi was an economics professor who led the “Insurgent Radicals” (UCRI) to victory in the 1958 elections.
The centrist direction he once represented was completely derailed when he was thrown out of office by the military in
1962. By 1970 civil war had broken out between the revolutionary left and the military, leading to “the dirty war”
during which the armed-forces used abduction, torture and murder to impose a bureaucratic-authoritarian “solution”
(Skidmore and Smith).
5
I would like to note the importance of Cuba and the Cuban revolution in the foundation of Latin American Cinema.
As Ana López has put it, “At the time the only socialist nation of Latin America, [Cuba’s] films have always been seen
as contributing to the New Latin American Cinema project. . . . The role Cuba has played in fostering New Latin
American Cinema has yet to be fully detailed: a listing of co-productions and Latin American exhibitions and
distribution agreements is not enough to explain the influential role of the ICAIC and the Cuban Revolution itself
through the continent” (151). Paul Willemen also stresses the importance of Marxist ideology in the Latin American
Film Project, stating that “The Latin American manifestos must also be seen in the context of Marxist or Marxistinspired cultural theories in general, where they mark a significant additional current with linkages passing both
through Cuba and through Italy, as well as developing homegrown traditions of socialist and avant-guardist thought.
The most direct connections in this respect, for a European reader, are with German cultural theory of the 1930s, with
Brecht and also with Benjamin” (231).
6
Interestingly enough, at the time of this writing Birri is a visiting professor at Tufts University in Medford, Maryland
(quite close to the heart of imperialism).
31
Besides calling for the unification of Latin American markets in order to sustain
Latin American film cinematic production and distribution (or exhibition), Birri also
frames film as another vehicle for addressing underdevelopment, which he sees as a
product of colonialism, “both external and internal” (93). He also criticizes the current
state of Argentine film, affirming that “The cinema of our countries shares the same
general characteristics of this superstructure” (93). His complaint is that Argentine people
are not being represented accurately, and a “real image” must be the first function of
documentary.
In 1969 Cuban filmmaker Julio García Espinosa writes another foundational
manifesto for Latin American film: “For an Imperfect Cinema.” Written ten years after
the Cuban Revolution, García Espinosa rejects the technical perfection and high
production value of Hollywood and European cinema and calls for a more
“revolutionary” art, in which the focus is again, on “the ordinary people” as more active,
participatory spectators now that they are being represented as the “raw material” of
“imperfect cinema.” García Espinosa desires a more democratic spectatorship and
extends Birri’s tenants beyond production and representation. He also criticizes
filmmakers for being too sensitive to the approval or disapproval of the European
intelligentsia. García Espinosa goes on to discuss cinema of denunciation as a potential
weapon in the struggle against imperialism and to describe the process of presenting a
problem without providing commentary as “to submit it to judgment without
pronouncing the verdict” (81). He echos Birri in many ways, but whereas Birri makes a
case for building a mainstream exhibition circuit in Latin America, García Espinosa
32
rejects what he calls “exhibitionism;” a fixation with such circuits. “The only thing
[Imperfect Cinema] is interested in is how an artist responds to the following question:
What are you doing in order to overcome the barrier of the ‘cultured’ elite audience
which up to now has conditioned the form of your work?” (82).
The same year, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino publish “Toward a Third
Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the
Third World” in Argentina. In this manifesto, as in the aforementioned ones, the
importance of de-lodging film from its U.S. models is paramount. Again, the struggle is
framed as one of anti-colonization, in which freeing Latin American film (and, by
extension, Latin America) from the ideology and world view of U.S. finance capital is the
goal. Solanas and Getino point towards “author’s cinema,” “expression cinema,”
“nouvelle vague,” and “cinema novo,” as possible directions for breaking from
Hollywood, experimenting with non-standard language and achieving cultural
decolonization. The direct influence of Franz Fanon reverberates in statements such as
this one: “The decolonization of the filmmaker and of films will be simultaneous acts to
the extent that each contributes to collective decolonization. This battle begins without,
against the enemy who attacks us, but also within, against the ideas and models of the
enemy to be found inside each one of us” (56).
It is important to note how in these manifestos “the people” become synonymous
with “the nation.” For example, Solanas and Getino write “Culture, art, science and
cinema always respond to conflicting class interests. In the neocolonial situation two
concepts of culture, art, science, and cinema compete: that of the rulers and that of the
33
nation” (35). In “An ‘Other’ History: The New Latin American Cinema” Ana M. López
describes how nationalism as a source of resistance becomes a key concept for Latin
American Cinema since nearly its inception: “In the face of what has always been
perceived as the dominating and stifling presence of other cultures and ideologies, the
cinema was identified early on as a crucial site for the utopian assertion of a collective
unity identified as the nation” (141).
The irony here lies in the fact that the goal was to advocate in favor of the
working class, but in the process of equating "the people" with "the nation" as the subject
of film, the unity of the nation as a vehicle for participation in the global market is what
is forwarded most powerfully. What follows is a national form that serves oligarchic
sectors more lucratively than any others. Similarly, in the introduction to his edited
volume, Visible Nations: Latin American Cinema and Video, Chon A. Noriega points out
that ". . . while New Latin American Cinema became a 'staging ground' for political
struggle, it did so within a region without a strong tradition of civic society, while the
filmmakers themselves were quickly assimilated into the auteur-as-nation-as-genre
sensibilities of the international art cinema" (xii). What would have, at inception,
appeared to be a noble attempt at making the subaltern visible, turns out to perhaps be
more accurately described as an erroneous collapsing of the filmaker’s position with the
people’s “reality”—all in the name of “the nation.”
The fixation with “realism” in Latin American film manifestos lasts well into the
1980’s, as can be seen in texts such as “For a Nationalist, Realist, Critical and Popular
Cinema” (1984) by Fernando Birri and “The Viewers Dialectic” (1988) by Tomás
34
Gutiérrez Alea first published in Cuba. As Gutiérrez Alea proclaims, “[Filmmakers] need
to be able to interpret and transmit richly and authentically reality’s image” (110).
In assessing the early films and theoretical writings of the New Latin American
Cinema, Ana M. López, describes how they “signaled a naïve belief in the camera’s
ability to record ‘truths’—to capture a national reality or essence without any
mediation—as if a simple inversion of the dominant colonized culture were sufficient to
negate that culture and institute a truly national one” (18). In “Recent Developments in
Feminist Criticism,” Christine Gledhill describes how a desire for realism is a predictable
first impulse for an oppressed group. However, she also effectively problematizes
simplistic notions of the feasibility of unmediated realistic representation:
Realism in [the] general sense is the first recourse of any oppressed
group wishing to combat the ideology promulgated by the media in the
interests of hegemonic power. Once an oppressed group becomes aware
of its cultural as well as political oppression, and identifies oppressive
myths and stereotypes, . . . it becomes the concern of that group to
explore the oppression of such images and replace their falsity, lies,
deception and escapist illusion with reality and the truth …“Reality” as
a formal modality in film involves a complex interplay of technical and
human mediations; “the real” therefore cannot simply be discovered but
has to be constructed in order to be conveyed. Since “reality” is not
after all a self-evident given, there is no simple alternative reality to fill
the gap left by the displacement of the “false” reality which is being
35
denounced, so the counter or alternative (“true” reality) must also be
constructed in this second sense. (162)
What the aforementioned Latin American Film manifestos do not recognize is exactly
what Gledhill points out: their own involvement in “constructing” reality as they see it. In
these manifestos filmmakers are called to simply “make reality visible” and are not
warned that every frame leaves something out, for example. It is in these kinds of choices
that the trace of the director’s hand and the limitations of the technology at work can be
examined.
López and Gledhill both point out the pitfalls of embracing inversion as an
antidote to cultural imperialism. In “The Third Cinema Question: Notes and Reflections,”
Paul Willemen expands on the “impulse” to “invert the damage” by attempting to “go
back” to a pre-colonial moment in cultural production. He describes how filmmakers
seek to:
develop the antagonistic sense of national identity by seeking to
reconnect with traditions that got lost or were displaced or distorted by
colonial rule or by the impact of Western industrial-military power. . . .
The main [dangers in this] derive from the need to reinvent traditions, to
conjure up an image of pre-colonial innocence and authenticity, since
the national-cultural identity must by definition be founded on what has
been suppressed or distorted. The result is mostly a nostalgia for a precolonial society which in fact never existed, full of idyllic villages and
communities people by “authentic” (read folkloric) innocents in touch
36
with the “real” values perverted by imperialism or, in the most naïve
versions, perverted by technology. Alternatively, particular aspects of
some culture are selected and elevated into essentialized symbols of the
national identity: the local answer to imperialism’s stereotypes.
Mirroring imperialism’s practices, such efforts mostly wind up
presenting previously existing relations of domination and
subordination as the “natural” state of things. (239-240)
In “The Third Cinema Question” Willemen not only points out the common pitfalls of
seeking out national identity, but goes as far as to state that the mission to represent
national realities and identities in film is doomed to be counterproductive in terms of
Latin American film’s revolutionary goals, despite the best intentions:
In fact, the West invented nationalism, initially in the form of
imperialism as nation-states extended their domination over others,
creating at one and the same time the hegemonic sense of the ‘national
culture’ and the ‘problem’ of national identity for the colonized
territories. The issue of national cultural identity arises only in response
to a challenge posed by the other, so that any discourse of nationalcultural identity is always and from the outset oppositional, although
not necessarily conducive to progressive positions. (239)
In essence, film studies on the topic of nationalism such as Willemen’s would point to the
conclusion that the national is never a solution for cultural colonization. Why then is
Paraguayan film so fixated on national identity? Why is the exploration of Paraguay’s
37
condition as a nation the dominant theme of film and documentary production in
Paraguay? Does “difference” (i.e. from U.S. and French cinema) in Paraguayan film try
(and fail) to promote a return to pre-global neoliberal order “values” in service of “the
people” or does it do something else entirely? These and questions of “authenticity,”
primitivism, and Orientalism are precisely what the following chapters explore. It could
be argued that in the Paraguayan context, an upholding of national identity and pride is a
gesture that goes directly against the dominant class’s historical patterns of assigning
value to cultural products; patterns in which the “traditional” and “folkloric” and
“essentially Paraguayan” exist for tourists and for country people perhaps, but definitely
not for the consumption of the class that matters—they shop in Buenos Aires or Paris.
Particularly during the dictatorship years, foreign brands not only trump national brands,
but become the only brands acceptable for use in public (by the consumers who can
afford it).7
Historically, the majority of the scholarship on Latin American Cinema from the
U.S. academy has predominantly been presented within a national frame: most
commonly the national frames of Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, Argentina and most recently,
Chile. There has also been a tendency to concentrate on the Latin American cinema from
the 1960s to the present. Revolutionary film movements, such as Cinema Novo in Brazil,
the post-Castro cinema of Cuba, or the films about Allende's Chile have dominated the
scholarship, while productions outside of the context of revolutionary situations have
7
Looking at the oldest Paraguayan brand names provides a hint of the extremity of this phenomenon in the
apparel business; traditionally major Paraguayan brands were always developed with an eyes towards
privileging the foreign referent as much as possible: i.e. Martel (apparel brand named after Frankish ruler
Charles Martel), Whaaldren, MacGregor, Manhattan, Bertolucci, etc.
38
been ignored. Thus, national productions in other countries (or in other periods) tend to
be absent from the literature. Considering this and the recentness of the Paraguayan film
production boomcito, (as Paraguayan directors modestly call it), it is not surprising that
there is almost no academic literature published on Paraguayan film.
In Magical Reels, John King dedicates two pages to Paraguayan cinema, starting
the section off with “ . . . Paraguay has not, until now, been able to sustain a national film
culture” (100). In 2003 the French film journal Cinemas d’Amerique latine printed an
interview with Paraguayan director Hugo Gamarra Etchverry titled “¿Existe el cine
paraguayo?” and in 2006, the same journal printed a follow-up interview with Gamarra
titled “A la espera del cine paraguayo.” Finally, in 2010, lack is no longer the only theme
of publications on Paragugyan film—The Film Edge: Contemporary Filmmaking in Latin
America edited by Eduardo Angel Russo includes a chapter by Paz Encina, director of
Hamaca Paraguaya. Encina briefly describes her concern with silence, history, time,
tempos, absence and distance and how she expresses these concerns in the film. The
present work finally takes on Paraguayan film as a whole in an attempt to analyze
dominant trends within the context of their production, one of the most important trends
being a focus on national identity itself. This project aims to explore some of the different
ways in which national iconography is operationalized in Paraguayan film: as a return to
the origins, as a site for “authenticity,” as the ingredients necessary to satisfy the
“developed” world’s need to exoticize and save the “developing” world and also as the
grounds from which to express political resistance and frustration with the status quo.
39
Historical Contextualization: A Particular History of Dictatorship
Paraguay’s independence from Spain and the Viceroyalty of La Plata (1810-1811)
is contiguous with the beginning of its history of dictatorship. Shortly after the
Paraguayan defeat of the Argentine army, a popular congress conferred the title of
Dictador on José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, who remained in power until his death in
1840. Due to the radical restructuring of social, economic and political institutions during
this dictatorship, historians such as E. Bradford Burns and Richard Alan White qualify
this period the first autonomous revolution in the Americas. These historians recount
how with strong popular support, Francia was able to set up a socialistic regime in
Paraguay involving a planned economy with a state monopoly on foreign trade; import
and export prices were set by the government. Radical land reform was carried out,
taking power from Spanish and creole elites through the confiscation of most of their
property. Similarly, the government kept control over the Catholic Church, starting with
land confiscation. Allegedly, Paraguay created a diversified and self-sufficient economy.
Taxes were lowered, budgets balanced and sustainable development became the priority.
Dictatorship as revolution? I will not defend or dispute Burns’ position, however,
I present Burns idea as an invitation to rethink public sentiment regarding dictatorship,
particularly for the working class in Paraguay. Burns describes the Francia dictatorship in
the following way:
Nearly isolated from contacts with the outside world, the landlocked
nation changed and developed under the leadership of Dr. Francia to
40
emerge as the most egalitarian society yet known in the Western
Hemisphere…Paraguay offered a better life to more of its citizens than
any of the other American Nations. (77)
This dictatorship is still configured in the national imaginary as one of the wealthiest
periods in Paraguay’s history and as a foundational moment. Francia may have been cruel,
but unlike his predecessors, he was cruel without discrimination: “No admitía escusas ni
reconocía privilegios. Ricos y pobres, militares o civiles, eran medidos con el mismo
rasero” (62) writes Paraguayan historian Efraím Cardozo. Francia’s regime represents an
origin; an imagined past previous to the moment in which the mestizo working class lose
their dignity to Paraguay’s Europeanized elite.
Jump to the Fundación de Asunción holiday, Aug. 15, 2010. I take a taxi home
from the port after a weekend cruise on the Paraguay River. On the topic of the holiday,
democracy and free speech, the driver says “Antes no se podía decir nada pero se comía
bien,” referring to the Stronato (the Stroessner dictatorship). His statement could be
considered part of the “éramos felices y no lo sabíamos” discourse, a popular attitude of
nostalgia for the Stronato. The sentiment is clear: “democracy” may have brought new
“freedoms” to Paraguay, but at a cost that was not agreed upon by the masses: a worse
economy, an increase in crime and arguably, an overall lower standard of living for
working class Paraguayans. There is not unanimous agreement in Paraguay that
dictatorship is a bad thing. In fact, Francia was immediately followed by populist
caudillos Antonio Carlos López and Francisco Solano López (1863-70), father and son
41
whose reign was only ended by the Triple Alliance War; a war financed in part by British
loans, in which Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay joined forces against Paraguay.8
The period after the Triple Alliance War and before the Stroessner regime, 1870
to 1954, is seen as a time of devastation and chaos in which Paraguay was ruled by 44
different men, 24 of whom were forced from office. The violence and instability related
to the struggle between political parties (specifically, the colorados and the liberales) are
the outstanding qualifiers of the period: a period seen as a limbo, a chaos, an in-between
moment; a moment that could only end with the beginning of a new dictatorship.
The histories of the foundational Francia dictatorship and the Stoessner regime
are written similarly. From a working class perspective, dictatorship is synonymous with
censorship and control, but also with stability and greater egalitarianism. From an elite
perspective, dictatorship is synonymous with terror, suppression and obstacles to the free
accumulation of wealth, particularly through international trade—unless, of course, one
was a personal friend of Stroessner’s.
The 35-year Stroessner dictatorship (1954-1989) concluded with Andrés
Rodriguez’s coup d’état of 1989, however, the process of apertura social (socio-cultural
and artistic change in public discourse) was slow to take hold. From teachers to
bricklayers, many speculate that this is related to the fact that every president elected
after the coup had close ties to the Stronato until Nicanor Duarte’s election in 2003.
Unfortunately, most concur that Duarte’s presidency was a monumental disappointment:
more of the same cronyism and corruption of the past. When left-leaning Fernando Lugo
8
Some, like Brazilian historian Julio José Chiavenatto, have referred to this war as a Paraguayan genocide
resulting in the eradication of nearly all males between the ages of fourteen and sixty-five.
42
was elected in 2008, the mood was optimistic again: for the first time since 1948 a nonmember of the Colorado party had risen to power.
This history of dictatorship in Paraguay created a counterproductive environment
for certain types of cultural production. As audiovisual producer Augusto Netto Sisa
explains:
La cultura era de gente rica…Si te tomaste un café en París eras culto o si no,
no… El arte fue dejado de lado. La dictadura hizo que la gente tenga menos
educación, que se cuestionen menos las cosas, y bueno, el arte y la cultura
tienen muchísimo que ver con eso…pero a través del Internet y de la nueva
tecnología la gente se da cuenta que el mundo es mucho mas amplio que salir
y compartir un asado y una cerveza….(personal interview)
Indeed, controlling audiovisual production was much more important to the Stronato than
encouraging it to flourish, and this control was not difficult given the scarcity and
expense of the technology that was needed to produce film. The few cine-clubs
established during the sixties and seventies were squelched in the late 70s and 80s as
“subversive” under the Stroessner dictatorship. The only completely Paraguayan largescale production (with a $600,000 USD budget) to come out of the period was Cerro
Corá (1977); a film financed by the state and widely regarded as political propaganda
created to extend a fascist version of Paraguay’s history as promoted by the Strossner
regime. As director Pablo Lamar explains, the Stronato’s control of cultural production
produced a general attitude of irrelevancy towards artists in general: “El artista no está
visto como una persona importante para la sociedad … Es una sociedad muy práctica y
43
funcional la nuestra. El artista sirve para decorar la casa [solamente]” (personal
interview).
The sudden “boomcito” of Paraguayan audiovisual production and its
transnational visibility parallels a political movement away from the old regime. Consider,
for example, that Nicanor Duarte was the first president (2003-2008) to be elected since
the coup d’état who did not have close ties to the Stroessner regime. In 2006, the featurelength fiction Hamaca Paraguaya was screened at the prestigious Cannes film festival
among others, winning multiple awards and becoming a pivotal “antes y después” point
for Paraguayan film. Ramiro Gómez’s pioneering documentaries, Tierra Roja (2006) and
Frankfurt (2008) won awards at various international film festivals during the Duarte
presidency. Marcelo Martinessi’s documentary Los Paraguayos, produced for Brazilian
oil company Petrobras as part of their Os Latinoamericanos series, was also released in
2006. This time line is remarkable in that it signals an upsurge in audiovisual production
in Paraguay and an international visibility of Paraguayan film that never existed before.
Pablo Lamar describes the effect of Hamaca Paraguaya on film production in
Paraguay in the following way:
A partir de Hamaca Paraguaya yo creo que realmente se dijo “Esperá un
poco…” Hay un boomcito de gente que quiere estudiar cine. Hay una
motivación en la gente, ya hay algo que está sucediendo. Creo que el gobierno
tiene que ofrecer un presupuesto suficiente y espacios de proyección habiendo
este interés. Hay que potenciarla. Mi miedo es que eso quede en un lugar
44
decorativo. En Paraguay las artes son decorativas. De hecho lo que más se
venden son cuadros. (personal interview)
Lamar, like other directors, sees this moment as pivotal because not only does it indicate
the emergence of Paraguayan film, but the emergence of a type of cultural product that
can function as a referent for defining national identity on a popular level. While
Paraguay boasts the late Augusto Roa Bastos, a boom author, as a representative of
paraguayidad, his works are not accessible in the same way that Paraguayan film is. In
most cases, Paraguayan film is able to communicate certain messages universally through
images and includes subtitles for non-Guaraní speakers. The most popular languages in
which to subtitle Paraguayan films are Spanish, English and French.
Lamar expands on the importance of the film boom in Paraguay describing it as
a new space for representation of and reflection on national identity:
Acá lo que pasa es que la identidad nacional es la hinchada del fútbol . . . No
hay una identidad nacional que tenga que ver con la vida. El fútbol es una
batalla, una guerra, un lugar mítico donde no hay una reflección. No es
necesario para el fútbol eso, pero sí es necesario para la identidad cultural del
Paraguay. Paraguay actualmente esta en un lugar súper critico para la
identidad nacional. Por eso me parece que el cine en Paraguay es un cine en
emergencia en doble sentido como se ha escrito. Es emergente pero al mismo
tiempo es una emergencia nacional. Porque es un nuevo medio que viene a
reflexionar sobre el Paraguay y cual es nuestra identidad… Por eso para mí
estamos en un momento muy radical. (personal interview)
45
Lamar’s comments illustrate the trend of conceptualizing Paraguayan film as a
compromiso cultural; a responsibility to the nation at large. However, this trend is
juxtaposed with a general erasure of overt politics in Paraguayan film; a topic I explore
further in Chapter 4. It is from Lamar’s interview that I take the title of this dissertation.
This is a moment when tensions between classes in Paraguay are mounting, when the
Lugo regime’s promises of land reform makes some fearful and others hopeful, and when
a practice of post-dictatorial civic engagement is budding and old ways of doing politics
are being challenged. The iconography of the nation becomes the most contested site for
the trafficking of images that could sway the masses. Reception becomes a new concern
whereas previously, the way to receive an image was simply dictated to the public. That
said, not only do I see Paraguayan film as emergent and urgent for the nation; I also see
the study of trends in Paraguayan film as an important opportunity for understanding how
representation is shaped by this cultural, economic and political moment in Latin
America at large.
The boomcito del audiovisual paraguayo continues viento en popa through the
presidency of Fernando Lugo. Lugo is seen as a public figure of impact who came to the
presidency at the same time as Barak Obama came to the presidency in the United States.
Parallels can be drawn between the two figures, as both represent a possibility for change
and a radical departure from the profile of past presidential figures. Lugo is the first noncolorado to be elected president in 61 years. He identifies with the working class in that
he is not a native of Asunción, but rather of rural Encarnación and has a working-class
background. As an ex-catholic priest, he has a record of supporting the liberation
46
theology movement. Lugo’s professed politics are decidedly socialist. And it has been
during his presidency that the first and only Paraguayan film to take on the Strossner
regime in any way, shape or form made its debut. The documentary Cuchillo de Palo,
directed by Renate Costa, tells the story of Renate’s uncle’s mysterious death and
describes the State’s organized persecution of homosexuals best exemplified by the
“Lista 108:” the regime’s gay “blacklist.” Cuchillo competed at the prestigious Berlinale
Film Festival of Berlin among other festivals, and was screened in a mainstream
Paraguayan theater, Cine del Sol, for a record four weeks in 2010: the longest time a
national film has played continuously in this shopping mall’s cineplex.
When asked about what the Lugo presidency might mean for Paraguayan film,
Lamar makes the connection in the following way:
A nivel político ocurre un cambio. Yo al gobierno de Lugo lo tomo como la
posibilidad de la palabra cambio. Que para él es una responsabilidad gigante
porque la palabra cambio es un estuche vacío donde todos proyectan lo que
quieren como cambio…Pero sería un momento, un quiebre, que por lo menos
es la negación de lo que venía antes simbólicamente hablando. Quizás no
hubo ningún cambio verdadero de estructura ni de paradigma de pensamiento
ni nada más allá de los discursos […] Pero simbólicamente me parece muy
fuerte.
Lugo’s presidency represents, if nothing else, the creation of a space in which signs,
signifiers and symbols in circulation in Paraguay can be rearticulated in a way that gives
them new meaning. When Gayatri Spivak theorizes rumors in “Subaltern Studies:
47
Deconstructing Historiography” she describes such utterances as errant, illegitimate and
inaccessible. Mentioning that Plato associates speech (logos) and law (nomos), the
errancy of rumor-speech defies the law and cannot belong to any one voice, therefore no
individual can be punished for breaking the law and in this way rumor re-assigns
meaning to symbols in circulation without being controlled by authority. Rumor then
signals a potential for insurgency, or in Jacques Rancière’s terms, a possibility for “the
taking part of those who have no part” or the miscount: “the account of the unaccounted
for.” If the Lugo presidency then represents an opportunity to re-appropriate the law or
status quo of symbol signification in Paraguay, what does this mean when the people who
are reinvesting meaning are not “those who do not count,” but rather, the upper class?
The most common profile of the Paraguayan film director is the following: a
person of privileged class status whose family has likely been able to assist financially in
their film school training abroad. These individuals are mostly thirty-somethings who
were born and raised in the capital city of Asunción. Almost none live off of their films
alone, but rather, mostly those who live in Asunción find that in order to support
themselves and pay for their film projects, they have to work in television and advertising
as well. As Netto puts it, “Si querés ganar plata tenés que hacer televisión. No hay otra.”
Lamar also describes how the Paraguayan socio-economic context affects directors: “Acá
son tan grandes las diferencias socioeconómicas que para tener el estilo de vida en que
vos tenés acceso a las cosas que uno tiene en otros países uno tiene que ser de clase alta,
y para ser de clase alta acá significa que tenés que trabajar de cualquier otra cosa que te
rinda, que no es la cosa que nos interesa (a los cineastas).”
48
This link between commercial production and film and documentary in Paraguay
certainly has aesthetic implications that are worth exploring, however, I am more
interested in what the political movement away from dictatorship means for directors in
Paraguay as part of a specific class. While movement away from the old regime runs
parallel with an increase in production and visibility of film products in Paraguay, what
does it mean that this same movement runs parallel with increased crime and poverty as
part of a daily reality for the working class? Could Paraguayan film be responding to
exactly this crisis, this emergencia? The question of who national identity works for as it
is employed through Paraguayan film and how is central to this study.
The events known as “Marzo Paraguayo” occurred in 1999. Then vice president Luís
María Argaña was assassinated on March 23 of said year. It was widely believed that the
president Raúl Cubas Grau and his puppeteer, Lino César Oviedo, were responsible for
this assassination. (Oviedo had previously been incarcerated for attempting a failed coup
d’état and was freed by Cubas Grau once the latter won the presidency.) Crowds
protested in the streets over the course of several days, demanding the end of the Cubas
Grau/Oviedo government immediately. Protesters were fired at by snipers located on
downtown rooftops, causing deaths and injuries. The end result, however, was the
creation of enough pressure to result in Cubas Grau’s resignation.
It is important to note that the violence of this event was not limited to exchanges
between protesters and sharpshooters. At the same time, Federación Nacional Campesina
del Paraguay had organized a manifestation with the purpose of lobbying for their own
49
interests not related to the political assassination. This group of campesinos was
purportedly mobililzed by Cubas Grau and Oviedo, and instructed to attack the protestors.
Paraguayan audio producer Roberto Andrés Valdovinos was present at public
protests that took place during Marzo Paraguayo. When asked why he felt the protest was
worth risking his life, (a risk he was well aware of, being that a fellow-protester was hit
by a bullet beside him during the second day of protest), he responded, “What I learned
the most from Marzo Paraguayo was that we do have the power to affect things. If Cubas
Grau remained in the presidency it meant a step backwards. If Oviedo came to power we
could be in a dictatorship again” (personal interview).
In light of the events of Marzo Paraguayo, one must ask if Federación Nacional
Campesina del Paraguay was manipulated as much as some accounts would have us
believe, or whether their actions are completely congruous with the defense of a political
model (authoritarian military dictatorship) under which the rural and working-class
standard of living was better. One must also ask if the elevation of the Paraguayan
campesino as the protagonist par excellance of Paraguayan film has to do with a need felt
by young, urban directors. How can a “democratic” Paraguayan national project go on if
the chasm between the urban elite and the campesino poor is not bridged somehow, at
least rhetorically?
¿Qué es el audiovisual?
Frequently when discussing all genres and modes of representation in Paraguay
(i.e. Manuel Cuenca’s comprehensive history of film in Paraguay titled “Audiovisuales
50
en el Paraguay”) people do not use the word film, but rather, the more inclusive term
audiovisual. Audiovisual has become a go-to term because it can include anything on film
or video: 35 mm, digital, released, unreleased, distributed or never even screened. The
term audiovisual forces a rethinking of how audiovisual production is classified into
genres, and also, points us towards a more fundamental question: when does a fiction
film or documentary “legitimately exist”? In the United States one may think a film exists
if it can be found on the Internet Movie Database. In Cuenca’s record, as in much media
coverage, a Paraguayan film or documentary is not less of a film or documentary if it has
never been purchased, distributed or even screened. As a matter of fact, most of the
Paraguayan films that have won awards at foreign film festivals are unknown to the
general population of Paraguay. Most have not been screened at mainstream theaters, and
even if they were, a movie ticket between 10,000 and 20,000 guaranies (between $2 and
$4) is unaffordable for the majority of the working class, being that minimum wage in
Paraguay is 1,507,500 guaranies; about 335.00 USD at the time of this writing. (A
noteworthy exception to this pattern is aforementioned Paz Encina’s Hamaca Paraguaya.
She took her film and screening equipment [cine móvil] to different rural locations where
free screenings were well-attended.) With these specific conditions of (non)distribution in
mind, one may ask who the audience or public of Paraguayan film really is.
Augusto Netto explains the dominance of the term audiovisual further, illustrating
the shift from celluloid to digital in contemporary filmmaking processes:
El tema es que acá no hay fílmico … Nosotros hacemos video … entonces
usamos el término que uno es un realizador audiovisual. Un realizador
51
audiovisual es el que te puede hacer desde un casamiento, o sea que sabe un
poco donde poner la cámara y como editar . . . Acá también decir que sos un
director de cine o un cineasta no tiene casi ningún sentido. Ahora, cuando
vos decís “Soy un realizador audiovisual” eso te entiende. “Ah, dirige tele,
hace tele, hace comerciales” … Porque no puedo decir cine … porque no hay
cine …. Acá no hay ningún título de carrera universitaria tampoco. Nadie
tiene un titulo de director, editor ni nada. Inclusive, te puedo decir por
experiencia que afuera te piden o un titulo de carrera universitaria de cine o
un premio porque si vos le das un título de una universidad de Paraguay, es
como decirle nada … “¿Con que cámara filmaste si en Paraguay no hay
cámara de cine? Hay cámara de video!” Y lo otro que te piden es un
premio … Al ganar un premio le estas diciendo que “Sí conozco la imagen y
como se trabaja y sí sé qué es el producto final.” El premio [de Emunho] es
mi título de cine.
Netto’s response touches upon factors that are key to understanding the context in which
film and documentary are produced in Paraguay: 1) Netto’s statement illustrates the close
relationship between television and commercial production and film and documentary
production. Many people who are involved in film and documentary got their start,
training, and daily bread in publicity and television. 2) In terms of supporting oneself,
only three out of the 13 directors I interviewed told me they are able to successfully live
off of their film projects, and in those three cases, funding was coming primarily from
extranational sources. 3) Formal film degrees are not available in Paraguay at this time,
52
although audiovisual degrees are. All the directors with film degrees I interviewed had
received these degrees from institutions in other countries. Netto’s comment about
credibility, status and awards is also key for understanding Paraguayan film. I explore the
role of international film festivals further in Chapter 3.
When asked the question “How have you financed your films?” Netto’s response is
typical: “Haciendo comerciales para pagar nuestras películas … pidiendo cámaras prestadas,
dependiendo de la buena voluntad de los actores … Ese es el proceso para comenzar. O si no
no hacés.” This is the way in which films are usually made in Paraguay; with scarce funding,
favors, IOUs, borrowed equipment and volunteer labor. Even after a film has wrapped in
Paraguay, it may be lucky to get through post production stages, it may never be distributed
by a company and even if it is purchased, it is unlikely to be distributed widely enough to
recover its own costs. None of the filmmakers I interviewed would agree that wide
distribution was a realistic part of their original goals. The most they would admit to hoping
for were a few screening opportunities, a little more visibility and better chances of securing
funding to help cover the costs of the next film.
Paraguayidad
What is paraguayidad? What does it mean to be paraguaya/o? Perhaps being
Paraguayan does not describe a citizenship as much as it describes an identity (and/or
lack of identity). Paraguay is and mostly has been a country of porous borders. So much
so that one could argue that the right to live in Paraguay is not limited to Paraguayans. In
fact, there are so many Brazilians living in the Paraguay/Brazil border region that it is not
53
uncommon to hear Portuguese spoken on the radio, in churches, businesses, etc. The
documentary Soberanía Violada, directed by Mariana “Malu” Vázquez, specifically takes
on the fact that 80% of the lands on which soybean, Paraguay’s primary export, is planted,
are owned by Brazilian investors.
Being that Paraguayan citizenship is, for practical purposes, not a requirement for
residency, it seems ironic that Paraguayan citizenship does not guarantee the possibility
of residency within the national borders considering the over half million Paraguayans
who have emigrated in search of better financial, professional and political opportunities
(that is roughly one in twenty Paraguayans).9 Similarly, the right to vote seems devalued
given the history of corruption of the political system. Also, given the severe corruption
of the Paraguayan legal system, one could say that it does not concede rights based on
nationality, (or even based on law) but rather, through a manipulation of law based on
economic and political power.
This raises questions about the role of government. If government is responsible
for the rule of law, yet there is a state of near lawlessness, than how does government
matter? It does provide some sort of structure, but generally speaking, the void produced
by historic failure of the rule of law in Paraguay has been filled by nepotism, clans, and
other family-centered behavior. As is usually the case in the absence of binding
contractual agreements, business deals can only be guaranteed only by some kind of
personal relationship. This helps explain the exceeding importance of “reputation” and
conformity with social norms, especially heteronormative ones, among members of
9
This data comes from “Ampliando horizontes: Emigración Internacional Paraguaya,” a report produced
by the Programa de las Naciones Unidas para el desarrollo in 2009.
54
Asunción society. Whereas the clothes one wears, the car one drives and the person one
dates may seem like superficial concerns to a person living in the United States or in any
perceived meritocracy, in Asunción these are status symbols that may help secure an
individual’s next professional opportunity.
In a sense, one could argue that this same social structure of controls also offers
protection. The fear of offending someone can protect that person from serious criticism.
This plays an especially pertinent role when it comes to reviews of Paraguayan films. As
director Ramiro Gómez puts it, “Este es el país de los incombustibles.” If someone has
enough money and/or political power, few will dare to criticize them, no matter how
worthy of criticism the piece they have produced may be. In fact, Gómez published an
Op-Ed in a national newspaper on the topic of “softness” in Paraguayan film criticism
(“Paraguay y su Cine Z”).
Director Augusto Netto Sisa expands on this concept while answering the
question, “Te parece que el cine paraguayo tiene un mensaje político?” His response:
No. Ese es otro error del cine paraguayo ... No le criticamos a nadie, si
le criticamos a no sé quién no nos va apoyar ni Itaipú ni Yacetretá
porque no le gusta lo que se dice. Si le criticamos a Fulanito nos va
odiar el partido colorado y el partido liberal, o no voy a decir el apellido
pero la familia de no sé quién no nos va a querer. Si tocamos temas gays
no le va gustar al pueblo. Hasta ahora el cine Paraguayo no se
comprometió con su sociedad.
55
Netto Sisa’s comment highlights the fact that at the time of this writing, Paraguayan film
is nearly devoid of examples that directly take on the topic of Paraguay’s political
regimes, including its dictatorial past. However, that does not mean that Paraguayan film
is completely apolitical. In the following chapters I argue that Paraguayan film and
documentary use allegory and symbolism to address political problems on a national and
transnational level. The erasure of the overtly political is also something I address
specifically in Chapter 4.
Specific interests and agendas shape legislature anywhere, but the fact that
Paraguay does not have film legislation, unlike its neighbors, it a noteworthy point.
Despite organization and pressures coming from the audiovisual community, the Ley de
Cine they have been lobbying for over the course of several years has gone nowhere.
Some would say that this is because it goes directly against television and movie theater
interests. Netto Sisa addresses the problem:
Mientras al estado no le interese, no va entrar la Ley de Cine. Hay demasiados
intereses… de canales de televisión, del cine…hay mucha gente que no quiere
que se haga esa ley porque esa ley hace pagar impuestos altos a comerciales que
no son de acá. En el cine hay que pagar un derecho de butaca que es un fee que
tiene que ir a la producción nacional, pero no se puede hacer eso porque no hay
ley…no hay ley de cine paraguayo, porque no hay nadie que le defienda. Somos
nosotros no más.
The Ley de Cine seems to echo Fernando Birri’s protectionist attitude toward the role of
national governments and film, as he states it in “Cinema and Underdevelopment.”
56
Government regulation is the way to guarantee distribution in name of the greater social
good. What Birri’s manifesto cannot account for in the Paraguayan situation is that a.)
many people are making large quantities of money on the “uncontrolled flow of foreign
films” into the country and b.) at what point is does this type of “regulation” become
censorship?
Returning to the concept of Asunción’s clannish social structure (as opposed to
legal structure) it is important to note that there is recognition of the systematicity itself,
that it is propped up and artificially sustained. Therefore, how people succeed outside of
this system is seen with a certain amount of respect and admiration. This is why
Paraguayan filmmakers prefer to screen their films at international film festivals before
screening them in Paraguay. If their films win awards abroad before they are even
screened in Paraguay, these awards set the tone for viewers and reviewers at home once
national screenings actually happen.
This constant “mirada hacia afuera” or looking outside the national borders to
gain knowledge of what is quality and what is of value plays in to what director Pablo
Lamar refers to as a “crisis de identidad nacional.” The assumption that the real tests of
quality exist outside national borders in systems that are independent of the artificially
propped up Asunción societal system and are presumably more meritocratic, creates a
desire for the individual to make herself/himself carry more signs from outside of the
country and less Paraguayan national or identitarian symbols. Netto Sisa expands on this
idea talking about his own experience:
57
Si los festivales de afuera dicen que está bien la película o tienen algún interés, la
gente recibe mucho mejor la película. Esa es la falta de identidad paraguaya…
Después de que Emunho ganó ese premio en Estados Unidos y vino, a todo el
mundo le gusta. Entonces viví eso en carne propia. Lastimosamente tenemos que
salir a festivales afuera, nos tienen que ver afuera, nos tienen que ver con otros
ojos y mirar realmente la película y no quién actúa, el apellido de quien es, quien
estuvo involucrado, quien fue el sonidista, de quien hablamos…Todo eso pasó
con Mangoré. Como hay tan poca formación de los críticos… Crítico paraguayo
dijo esto, crítico romano dijo esto, ¿quién vale más? El crítico romano. Hay poca
credibilidad en la formación del crítico paraguayo.
Certainly part of this lack of trust in the Paraguayan film critic has to do with the social
system in which they are entrenched, but the lack of a filmic tradition and film schools
may have more to do with the fact that critics in Paraguay are not prepared to publish
(somewhat) objective, formal analysis.
In an article self-reflexively titled “Is wi support of de nashonal sings?” published
in Clip magazine’s June 2010 issue, “support of national things” is exactly the topic up
for discussion. The article is made up of polls in which people are asked questions
regarding how much they know about national cultural products and their opinions of
such. The introduction to the article includes the following comments in Paraguayan
urban speak:
¿Por qué lo que la gente piensa que un título en inglés es más picho? Qué manga
de p*LOt%ds [pelotudos], pero bueno, ese es otro tema … ¿Ser paraguayos es
58
para nosotros un orgullo? ¿Qué pensamos de nuestra paraguayidad? … No es que
siempre queramos ponerles en apuros, gente, es que a nosotros mismos nos da
verguencita el poco apoyo que damos a lo hecho acá. Y bueno, medio difícil
luego darle apoyo a algo de lo que conocemos casi nada. (14)
The first question in the poll is “¿Cuán orgulloso estás de ser paraguayo?” It is
noteworthy that supporting national cultural products is framed as a matter of nationalism
or national pride itself. The gaze, however, turns outside again in the question “Alguna
vez usaste la frase ‘no parece Paraguay o ‘no parece hecho acá’?” to which 87%
answered yes. I myself heard the phrase when I ran into a former classmate from high
school at an upscale restaurant/bar/art space called El Club Francés. In expressing his
appreciation for the place, as he was visiting for the first time, he said “Que lindo lugar.
Esto ni parece Paraguay.”
The author wraps up the article with the following comments: “Quizás está demás
decir que nos falta una inyección de arte nacional y amor por nuestra patria … ¿Sólo por
ser paraguayos serán buenos? Jamás, pero si ni siquiera le damos una oportunidad,
seguiremos siendo un pueblo sin identidad ni voz propia.” The intersection between
cultural production and nationalism is literal and direct. The concept that a nation could
lack an identity is a fascinating concern of which I not certain what to make of yet. What
I have noticed, however, is that a popularly held belief is that cultural production in
Paraguay will give Paraguay a national identity. This concept is acutely present and in the
foreground of statements made by Paraguayan artists and musicians.
59
In an interview published at cineparaguay.com, the highly active producer Tana
Schémbori answers the question “¿Comparado a lo que era antes, ustedes; cómo ven
actualmente a nuestras producciones?” saying “…hay un movimiento de gente y que en
cierta manera, estamos unidos por las ganas de que Paraguay tenga su identidad afuera,
que antes no existía…” Juan Carlos Maneglia, her production partner, has also cited
Alberto Issac saying “A people without cinema is a people without an image.” In a
similar sentiment, Paiko, one of the best-known rock bands in Paraguay, repeat this
phrase in key places, such as on their website and on the signed guitar prominently
displayed at Music Hall record store in Shopping Mariscal López: “Un país sin música,
es un país sin sentimientos.” Both of these instances illustrate a responsibility that
producers of Paraguayan cultural products believe pertains to them: they feel charged
with creating a quality product that represents Paraguay. Paraguayan artists and
musicians therefore are not only charged with being creative and expressing themselves
on an individual level, but with defining paraguayidad itself while assuming a type of
cultural ambassadorship. Lamar highlights the seriousness with which he and other
directors take this type of compromiso social stating that “El cineasta tiene que tener el
igual salario que el diputado porque hace un trabajo importante para la sociedad.”
This responsibility is reflected in Ramiro Gómez’s comments published in Última
Hora newspaper’s online edition under the title “En debate: Reflexiones sobre ‘un
posible cine paraguayo.’” In his piece he argues for the “right” kind of film for Paraguay.
Film is not seen as simply an individual, creative process but rather as a contribution to
an archive that defines Paraguay. If someone makes a bad film, they should, as in the
60
words of Netto Sisa, “watch it in their living room with their friends but not show that in
the theater.” In the United States, if someone makes a bad film, the onus is on them. In
Paraguay, if someone makes a bad film they have marred national film as a whole.
Gómez, like Birri, is a director who sees one “correct” path for Paraguayan film; the kind
of path he himself followed, one that includes formal training at a recognized film school,
grit and determination. In his piece, Gómez argues against trying to produce “box office
hits” in Paraguay, offering that not enough Paraguayans can afford to go to the theater, so
the return on this kind of film is not worth it. "A un país pobre corresponde un cine
austero." These comments indirectly refer to the upcoming release of Siete Cajas
produced by Maneglia y Schémbori; the first contemporary Paraguayan film openly
aspiring to be a future box office hit.
Returning to the question “what does it mean to be paraguay@?” it seems to mean
less about citizenship and more about what Lauren Berlant calls an intimate sphere:
[I]ntimate spheres feel like ethical places based on the sense of capacious
emotional continuity they circulate, which seems to derive from an ongoing
potential for relief from the hard, cold world. Indeed the offer of the simplicity
of the feeling of rich continuity with a vaguely defined set of like others if often
the central affective magnet of an intimate public. (6-7)
Berlant elaborates further on the concept of intimate publics stating that:
[W]hat counts as collectivity has been a loosely organized, market structured
juxtapolitical sphere of people attached to each other by a sense that there is a
common emotional world available to those individuals who have been marked
61
by the historical burden of being harshly treated in a generic way and who have
more than survived social negativity by making an aesthetic and spiritual scene
that generates relief from the political. (10)
The sociopolitical and economic problems that influence people’s everyday lives in
Paraguay are frequently seen as a “hard, cold world” from which there is little relief to be
found. Thus, the flip side or “cultural” side of Paraguayan nationalism represents a
possible way to address the failings of the political reality of paraguayidad. Creating this
cultural side is indeed a task taken on by directors as an ethical or even moral
responsibility that the creative intellectual owes to the rest of the collectivity. Since el
pueblo paraguayo has been collectively marked by the “historical burden” of oppression
and violence through colonization; at the hands of its neighbors (as in the case of the
Triple Alliance War); through dictatorship and finally through the corruption of its
present-day “democracy”—creating and sustaining a common emotional world, “an
aesthetic and spiritual scene” that generates Paraguayan pride and relief, does indeed
seem essential following Berlant’s logic of intimate publics.
This is something I explore further in Chapter 4.
A History of Audiovisual Production in Paraguay and the Foreign/Male Gaze
Paraguay’s history of dictatorship is related to a history of foreign relations that waver
between isolationism and intense transnational cultural and economic exchange.
Francia’s policy was that of “enclaustramiento total del pais” to use one of Efraím
62
Cardozo’s phrases. “Ningún paraguayo pudo salir del país y nadie pudo ingresar a él,
como no fuera en calidad de cautivo. El Paraguay se descuajó de la vida exterior” (63).
However, Francia himself was an “import” of sorts, his father was rumored to be
Brazilian or Portuguese. Francia’s ideology was heavily influenced by French
philosphers Jean-Jacques Rousseu and Maximilien Robespierre. While political scientists
such as Paul Sondrol have credited Stroessner’s popularity to his “typically Paraguayan”
characteristics of authoritarianism, ultra-nationalism and xenophobia, Stroessner himself
was also an “import” to the extent that Francia was: his father emigrated from Germany.
Even the history of the revered Francisco Solano López, who “gave his life for the
nation” in the Triple Alliance War, is tightly interwoven with the mythology surrounding
of his Irish lover, Madame Elisa Lynch. Together the couple represents unsurpassed
iconicity of Paraguayan hypernationalism and patriotism.
In Paraguayan history “el exterior” has been seen as a threat to Paraguayan
independence and/or the territory (in terms of border wars such as the Guerra del Chaco)
and/or a threat in terms of imperialist designs (in the case of British support of the Triple
Alliance Wars and more recently, a threat in terms of global neoliberal exploitation
embodied primarily by the United States and increasingly, Brazil). However, at the same
time “el exterior” is considered the only credible source for educational training and
technical expertise. For example, in pre-Guerra del Chaco Paraguay, modernization
projects contributed to the idealization of European institutional models over native ones,
(Cardozo, 129). In the case of Paraguayan filmmakers, formal training must come from
abroad but elements must be “Paraguayan.”
63
Manuel Cuenca’s unpublished history of Paraguayan film titled “Audiovisuales
en el Paraguay” is not limited to film, but rather, extends to many different kinds of
audiovisual production, including objects of more difficult classification such as snippets
of video footage captured by foreign geography professors, anthropologists, missionaries,
etc. This history of audiovisuales in Paraguay does not begin with Paraguayan production,
but rather with foreign videographers representing Paraguay. In fact, the first twenty
years that Cuenca accounts for (1905-1925) is entitled “Extranjeros filman durante dos
décadas” which includes:
1920 – United States professor W. O. Runcie produces footage of Saltos del
Guairá for his geography classes.
1921/22 (?) - Count De Vauvrin, scientist and documentary maker from
Belgium, produces the following documentaries screened in Paris: En el
corazón de América del Sur desconocida, Entre los indios hechiceros, Los
indios del Gran Chaco, Las cataratas del Iguazú, La América exhotica and
El Paraguay.
1923/24 - Emilio Peruzzi, italo-argentine, produces the documentary Tribus
salvajes on the Maká tribe of Argentina and Paraguay. Screened in South
America and Europe.
1925 – German national Hans Krieg, director of a German zoo, directs a
documentary on his expedition to the Chaco, from Rio Pilcomayo near the
border with Bolivia up until Puerto Suárez on the Paraguay River, entitled
64
Expedition Paraguay. He also produces Los indígenas del Gran Chaco,
which includes a scene of a shaman “exercising” the illnesses from the body
of an elderly patient.
According to Cuenca, only after 25 years of foreign audiovisual production in Paraguay
does one finally encounter the first example of a Paraguayan-produced audiovisual
recording. In 1925 Alma paraguaya is completed; a documentary about the yearly
peregrination in honor of the Virgen de Caacupé. How does knowing or imagining that
the first images of Paraguay were anthropological films “captured” by foreigners affect
the process of producing national film?
In discussing the fetishization of the Guaraní language in contemporary
Paraguayan film and documentary, Pablo Lamar had this to say: “En Paraguay se habla
Guaraní, pero yo no voy a hacer una película y hacer que hablen en Guaraní para que
tenga un exotismo. ‘¡Ah, está hablada en lengua indígena!’ Al europeo, ya le veo con su
camarita sacándole fotos como si fuera el europeo que vino a mirar los indígenas en no sé
qué año.” Lamar’s statement illustrates the conflict between a desire to represent
Paraguay “faithfully” (“En Paraguay se habla Guaraní”) while also wanting to avoid
being complicit with an exoticization of Paraguayan difference produced for the
satisfaction of foreign eyes.
In Cuenca’s history of recorded images the foreign gaze is structured like the
male gaze in Laura Mulvey’s foundational text, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”
Mulvey connects the theories of Sigmund Freud and Jaques Lacan to discuss the visual
tradition of mainstream Hollywood cinema. “… In his Three Essays on Sexuality, Freud
65
isolates scopophilia as one of the component instincts of sexuality…associated with
taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze” (381).
In the relationship that Mulvey describes using Freud, the spectator gains control,
possession and pleasure through the objectification of the other through the gaze.
Similarly, the anthropological curiosity that seems to drive the first recorded images
taken in Paraguay are seen as a form of cultural colonization and domination.
Mulvey also refers to Jaques Lacan’s mirror phase as related to the process of the
gaze; “the long love affair/despair between image and self-image” (382). Just as the
development of the child’s subjectivity is based on recognition/misrecognition in the
mirror, in Cuenca’s account, the titles connote a process through which U.S. and
European spectators are able to develop their identity though a process like Said’s
Orientalism; a process of recognizing that which is like them, but is also fundamentally
different from them. Only through the construction of this exotic, mysterious, magical,
savage, dangerous, ancient difference can the spectator construct their normal, rational,
scientific, civilized, stable, modern identity. Mulvey, Claire Johnston and others might
argue that this process, like the “scopophilic instinct” itself, are the mechanisms on which
cinema’s formal attributes are constructed overall (388).
Mulvey also uses Freud to explore the anxiety related to difference through the
metaphor of castration. Freud explains that the male’s anxiety surrounding recognizing
woman’s difference (lack of a penis) is due to a fear that he, too could somehow be like
her: penisless. As Mulvey explains:
66
The male has two avenues of escape from this castration anxiety:
preoccupation with the re-enactment of the original trauma (investigating
the woman, demystifying her mystery), counterbalanced by the
devaluation, punishment or saving of the guilty object…or else complete
disavowal of castration by the substitute of a fetish object or turning the
represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather
than dangerous (hence over-valuation, the cult of the female star). (386)
Similarly, the U.S. or European spectator’s anxiety may stem from the fact that he
is more like the “savage” than he is comfortable with. This causes him to try to
investigate and demystify by capturing the savage on film for study. Through film, the
savage can be punished through the control and objectification of the gaze, or/and can be
construed as a fetish object; something that is not even human, but rather, so otherworldly that it has powers, like the shaman, to exercise demons.
If we extend the relationship between the male spectator and the female object of
the gaze to John Berger’s work, one can connect Mulvey’s female to-be-looked-at-ness to
Berger’s description of the female sense of self: “Her own sense of being in herself is
supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another” (46). In light of
Cuenca’s record and the fact that contemporary Paraguayan films are mostly screened at
film festivals outside of Paraguay, one must ask to what extent Paraguayan national
identity or “sense of being in herself” is constructed through a reflexive gaze, a sense of
being appreciated as herself by an other, powerful spectator.
67
Berger relates the spectator position to the market: “In the average European oil
painting of the [always female] nude the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the
spectator…the spectator-owner” (54-56). Seen through the market lens, the spectator
owns the gaze and that which is the object of the gaze. “Oil painting did to appearances
what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects.
Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity” (87). At the
intersection of Mulvey and Berger, the gaze has the capacity to control, own, objectify,
reduce, fetishize, and commodify simultaneously and invisibly. Because a film, like an oil
painting, can be presented as a work of art that “… suggests a cultural authority, a form
of dignity, even of wisdom, which is superior to any vulgar material interest; an oil
painting belongs to the cultural heritage; it is a reminder of what it means to be a
cultivated European” (135). The constructed-ness of “the way things are” is hidden by the
unquestionable purity and divinity of the artist’s muse.
Similarly, the backwardness of non-european peoples is secured as an unquestionable
“way things are” through dominant discourses on the linearity of time presented as selfevident truths, so obvious and natural, that they should not, in fact, cannot, be questioned.
It is precisely this “irrefutable nature” that makes the linearity of time such an effective
discursive tool for the marginalization of racialized and gendered peoples placed within
the temporal frame. One of the key theoretical frames of this study has to do with an
exploration of how the present does not result from the past due to a logical and
incontrovertible sequence of events, but rather, what we perceive as the past results from
present hegemonic interests. A theoretical exploration of discourses on past/present
68
binaries reveals that this manicheistic form of thought functions as a melancholic stand-in
for more overtly racist and sexist discourses. The naturalization of authority’s discourses
on time and progress are in convenient correspondence with social class stratification and
hierarchy. Some theorists whose work I explore in Chapter 3 for thinking through this
gendered and racialized temporal construct are Walter Benjamin, Anne McClintock,
Frantz Fanon, Stuart Hall, and Anne Cheng.
69
CHAPTER 2: HAMACA PARAGUAYA: BETWEEN RESISTANCE…
In this chapter I analyze the national/transnational context, form and content of
Un Certain Regard winner of Cannes 2006, Hamaca Paraguaya, widely recognized as
the “before and after” marker par excellence of Paraguayan film: the film that showed
young directors that a Paraguayan film could “be successful” on a world stage; a hugely
meaningful moment for a small and impoverished nation that experiences invisibility as
part of its national existence. In the third chapter, however, I also demonstrate the irony
of this film’s success in its entrenchment within a cultural, economic and political system
reliant on binaristic and hierarchical identitarian politics: the building blocks of the very
discourses that maintain national and transnational imbalances of power and wealth.
When discussing Paraguayan film, it is necessary to speak of Hamaca first. Its
characteristics are those that dominate the archive of Paraguayan audiovisual production.
For example, it won competitive funding and awards at international film festivals; it
takes the campesino figure as its protagonist; the dialogue of this film (again, like the rest
of the archive) is entirely in Guaraní, the indigenous language of Paraguay. The daily
labor and banal routine that make up rural living constitutes the majority of the action of
the film (as is also the case in most of the Paraguayan archive).
Hamaca begins with a dark space that is slowly lit to reveal a thick forest and a
small clearing covered by leaves. It is dawn. The sounds of birds chirping, a rooster
crowing, and a dog barking can be heard in the distance. Thunder rolls more faintly in the
70
distance, also. The elderly couple—Cándida and Ramón—are barely perceptible at first.
They enter the frame as if coming onto a stage.10 They seem to be about twenty to thirty
feet from the camera in a long shot. It is impossible to make out their faces with the
distance and the dark. At first the couple bickers about where to hang the hammock,
whether it will rain, whether or not to give water to the barking dog, etc., but
conversation promptly turns to the topic of their son, and how he might be, how they miss
him and want him to come home from the war. Ramón complains that the war is good for
nothing. They drink tereré.11 They talk about how their crops will not last much longer in
the drought. It is dark and cloudy, it seems it might rain, but it does not. In fact, it is
completely still. The audience gets the idea that these types of conversations have been
going on for a long time when Ramón says “¿Cómo estará nuestro hijo? Yo le extraño.
Quiero que venga,” and Cándida replies saying “Todos los días hablás de la guerra. No
querés hablar de otra cosa.” Bertolt Brecht’s verses come to mind: “What kind of times
are these/ when a talk about trees is almost a crime/because it implies silence about so
many horrors?” How could the couple talk about anything else? Indeed, their son haunts
them for the duration of the film.
The dog barking in the background is nearly constant. The audience knows it is a
female dog from the beginning (perra) and come to find out that it is their son’s dog, and
she is barking because she misses him. Her barking bothers the couple, and they discuss
10
This seems congruent with the actors’ theater experience. Most actors in Paraguay have had more
experience in theater than in film.
11
Tereré represents a traditional Paraguayan way to drink yerba mate tea cold. The toasted leaves are
placed in a hollowed bull horn or gourd with a metallic straw. Cold water is then added and sucked out
repeatedly.
71
the possibility of giving her more water, or maybe giving her one of Máximo’s old shirts
to comfort her.
When she finally stops barking, conversation turns to the possibility of rain again.
The couple goes back and forth between hope that it will rain and that their son will come
home and hopelessness. The dog starts to bark again. Cándida complains that she is not
comfortable. “No hay nada que hacer” she says repeatedly during their conversations,
demonstrating a powerlessness and frustration with their situation. Yet finally, in this
scene, it is she who gets up and walks away slowly, while fanning herself. Ramón
follows, with a similar slow gait and short steps. The shot would seem to be one long take
with the exception of only two shots of the sky: so dark and cloudy it is barely
recognizable.
It is possible that by this point the audience may have noticed that during these
“conversations” neither character’s mouths are moving. The audience may be unsure if
the protagonists are in fact communicating non-verbally, or if these are interior dialogues,
or if these are the conversations they have had or would be having. Whatever the
viewer’s speculations, it is clear this is not a traditional move on the director’s part. The
entire rest of the film continues this way: the audience never sees a mouth pronounce a
word.
In the next scene Ramón is cutting cane, very slowly and by himself. A voice
speaks to him: it is his son, Máximo. Máximo tells his father he is afraid. Ramón
encourages him to be quick on his feet and come home soon. They speak a little of war.
“Nosotros los pobres siempre estamos en guerra” Ramón says. Máximo tells his father he
72
wants to change his name so that his mother will not find out when he dies. Ramón tells
him, “No cambies de nombre. Tu nombre es mi nombre también.” When Máximo tells
his father that his mother does not want him to fight, Ramón responds, “Tu mamá es
mujer mi hijo, no entiende de estas cosas. Pero te tenés que ir a defender tu patria—vos
sos un hombre. Vas a estar bien mi hijo. Y pronto esta lluvia va a llegar al chaco.”
Máximo asks his father to take care of his mother. The camera comes in for a three
quarter close up from behind, showing the back of Ramón’s head and a small part of his
face when Máximo says he wants to say goodbye. Ramón does not want to hear this talk
of final goodbyes. “Ya me voy papá,” Máximo insists. “Andá mi hijo, despedite de tu
mamá también,” Ramón finally concedes.
The film resumes with Cándida washing clothes in a stream. Just as with Ramón,
Máximo’s voice “comes to her” also. He makes clear that he is there to say goodbye. She
protests: “¿Quién le va a cuidar a tu perra? ... ¿Mi hijo, porqué no te escondés? Muchos
se esconden en los árboles.” Máximo tries to give his mother some hope, “Parece que va
a llover, mamá.” “Siempre parece” she responds cynically. “Me tengo que ir” he insists.
Cándida lashes out against the war: “No me interesa la guerra. Para mí que se mueran
todos. . . . Esa guerra te va a quitar de nuestro lado. Es lo único que va a hacer.” Máximo
tries to calm her by promising to come home soon. She tells him “Metí adentro de tu
bolsa el poncho de tu abuelo.” The camera comes in for a three quarter close up from
behind, (as it did with Ramón in the previous scene), as Cándida tells her son how
heartbroken she is to lose him: “Este corazón, si fuera de piedra, ya se hubiera roto.”
Máximo tries to promise her he will come home soon.
73
The film cuts briefly to Ramón and three other men in the cane field, taking a
break, then a group of four women and two children preparing the clothes they have
washed.
In the following scene the hammock is hanging alone in the clearing. Ramón
enters the frame and has a conversation about the hammock with Cándida’s voice. She
says the hammock is not sturdy enough for the two of them, while he complains that it is
not even that old. He tells her that she likes to complain about everything. Finally, as they
are having one of their familiar conversations about the weather, her body comes into the
frame. “Hace rato que ni tengo ganas de hablar, Ramón” she says. This statement does
indeed cause the viewer to think further about the nature of their “conversations.”
Cándida and Ramón sit next to each other in the hammock. Again, the conversation turns
to rain, their son and a back and forth between hope and hopelessness. The camera shows
a sky that is very dark and cloudy, but still, no rain. “No le importamos a nadie Ramón”
Cándida states. The couple notes that the dog is not barking and bicker about whether it is
dead or sick. Cándida confesses that she never gave the dog Máximo’s old shirt, as they
had discussed. Their conversation continues in the same circles for a while until Ramón
finally leaves to check on the dog. Cándida soon follows. The hammock is empty again.
The film cuts to Ramón sitting outside of a small building. We hear his
conversation with a veterinarian (Don Jacinto) who tells Ramón that the dog is
dehydrated. He asks how long since the dog has had water, to which Ramón responds
that with the drought, there is no water for anyone, much less the dog. Ramón goes into
the house to ask the vet if he knows anything about the war. Don Jacinto tells him that
74
Paraguay won the war two days ago. Ramón comes back out of the building and sits back
in the chair. To him, the victory is a loss. “Hay que salvarle, Don Jacinto” he says, with a
new determination to save his son’s dog. He explains that although the war is over, his
son has not come home.
The next scene shows Cándida next to a tatakua,12 fanning herself. A young
man’s voice comes to her, asking where he is. He states he is looking for the Caballero
family, the parents of Máximo Caballero. He explains that he is a messenger, and that
Máximo died on the front lines. A bullet went through his heart. He asks her if she is
Máximo’s mother. She does not respond directly, but rather asks for the shirt Máximo
was wearing when he was shot. She does not cry, she just sits next to the tatakua, rocking
slightly. Finally she tells the soldier that all the men around here have the same name and
probably Máximo was not her son. She then tosses something into the oven and tells the
messenger to get rid of that old shirt.
The next scene begins in the clearing with the hammock again. Cándida and
Ramón are conversing, but their bodies are not present yet. The sky is still grey. They
move into the frame and sit in the hammock. They talk about the sunset and the chance of
rain. Ramón tells Cándida that the war is over. “Pero y de la guerra no sabés nada?” she
insists. “No sé nada” Ramón replies, in an instance that reveals that for them, the war was
never about Bolivia. Their war is only about their son. It gets darker. There is no dog
barking this time. Ramón asks Cándida if she has heard any news. She hesitates, but
finally tells Ramón that she found a dead butterfly that she threw in the tatakua. “Esa
12
A tatakua is a brick oven used traditionally in the Paraguayan countryside.
75
guerra hizo que se nos acaben las ganas de todo” Ramón declares. “Pero igual seguimos
haciendo todo,” Cándida replies, “Para que así el tiempo pase más rápido.” When
Cándida asks Ramón if his chest is bothering him, he replies “Me duele mi hijo.” The dog
starts barking again. The couple bickers over whether they should have let her die. It gets
progressively darker, but they are slow to leave the hammock. They talk about getting up,
but it gets very dark indeed before they can actually overcome their pain and muster the
energy to move. In their speech they have changed roles somehow, Ramón is now the
cynical one who was lost hope and Cándida is the one who tries to cheer him up and
comfort him. She is now the one who offers to cover him in their bed. “Estamos
demasiado lejos y demasiado viejos. Ya me quiero ir a dormir. No nos vamos a llorar.
Todavía no nos morimos. Nos tenemos uno al otro. Estamos hechos el uno para el otro.
Estamos felices así,” they say to each other. It gets darker and darker. They have a little
lamp, but the viewer can barely see their silhouettes. They decide to go to bed without
eating, “Y porqué vamos a comer?” Ramón, says, defeated. They finally take the
hammock down and fold it up, now in almost total darkness. As they walk toward home,
the dog starts barking again.
Hamaca’s Formal Resistance
Possibly the first observation a viewer may make about Hamaca would have to do
with how it differs from the traditional Hollywood way of telling a story. It is worthwhile
to return to Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s manifesto, “Toward a Third Cinema:
76
Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third
World” to think about how this difference functions:
The placing of the cinema within U.S. models, even in the formal aspect, in
language, leads to the adoption of the ideological forms that gave rise to
precisely that language and no other. Even the appropriation of models which
appear to be only technical, industrial, scientific, etc., leads to a conceptual
dependency, due to the fact that the cinema is an industry, but differs from
other industries in that is has to be created and organized in order to generate
certain ideologies. . . . not to gratuitously transmit any ideology, but to satisfy,
in the first place, the cultural surplus value needs of a specific ideology, of a
specific world-view: that of U.S. finance capital. (41)13
Solanas and Getino go on to promote “alternative” types of cinema, within which they
include “author’s cinema,” “expression cinema,” “nouvelle vague,” “cinema novo,” and
more generally, “second cinema.” From Solanas and Getino’s viewpoint, alternatives to
Hollywood/U.S. finance capital are defined by the “freedom” the filmmaker may have to
express “himself” in non-standard language. This alone was seen as “an attempt at
cultural decolonization” (42). Similarly, in “Cinema and Underdevelopment,” Fernando
Birri also describes cinema as a tool to fight “external and internal colonialism” when it
rejects “the same general characteristics of the superstructure,” (93). In “For an Imperfect
Cinema” Julio García Espinosa describes imperfect cinema as a “cinema of
13
The insistence on the colonizing essence to be found in the very materiality of cultural imperialism
produced in relation to the cinema is also a topic of discussion in feminist cinema studies. See for example
"Women's Cinema as Counter-Cinema" (1975) in: Claire Johnston (ed.), Notes on Women's Cinema,
London: Society for Education in Film and Television, reprinted in: Sue Thornham (ed.), Feminist Film
Theory. A Reader, Edinburgh University Press 1999, pp. 31-40
77
denunciation” and a potential weapon in the struggle against imperialism (80). He states
that “the only thing imperfect cinema is interested in is how an artist responds to the
following question: What are you doing in order to overcome the barrier of the ‘cultured’
elite audience which up to now has conditioned the form of your work?” (82).
Hamaca’s camera work employs many long shots, and makes few exceptions for
close-ups, limiting closer approaches to come only from behind. Not only does this kind
of camera work directly contrast U.S. models, but it engages with a specific trace:
Manuel Cuenca’s “Audiovisuales en el Paraguay;” an unpublished history of mostly
foreign videographers representing Paraguay.14 The earliest historic role of celluloid in
Paraguay had to do with precisely what the aforementioned manifestos called cultural
colonization and imperialism: they were orientalist instances of footage taken by lightskinned Europeans and U.S. citizens as anthropological examples of what Paraguayans
are: dark-skinned, exotic, magical shamans; Others virtually beyond comprehension. The
way Hamaca creates distance between the camera and the protagonist revises history on
multiple levels. On the formal level, by using long, less invasive shots it undoes, or at the
very least, does not repeat the violence of the first or “original” moments of film in
Paraguay by redeeming those who were taken as the anthropological objects/subjects of
film. On the textual level, Hamaca revises the official “glory” of the Chaco War, telling it
from the perspective of overwhelming loss, from the perspective of those who sacrificed
their loved ones.
14
See Chapter 1.
78
Another formal way in which Hamaca is markedly different from mainstream,
Hollywood cinema has to do with its tempo. For many viewers, it is a painstakingly slow
film. When writing the description of the film above, I had difficulty deciding which
details to include and which to leave out: this made me cognoscente of the fact that
Hamaca is not necessarily a film that lacks action, as I had initially thought. Rather, it is a
film full of action but of a different kind: action that is done with speech. Extending John
L. Austin’s conception of linguistic speech acts may be helpful as a metaphor here: what
if in the case of Hamaca we could refer to these instances as unspoken speech acts given
the fact that no “speaker” ever moves their mouth? I return to the implications of how
speech takes place in Hamaca further on.
The slowness of Hamaca frees it from conformity with mainstream Hollywoodstyle film in exactly the sense that Solanas and Getino saw cine de autor functioning.
Hamaca’s freedom from speed, action and close-ups creates a more intimate cinema, in
which the protagonists continue to reserve a certain amount of privacy in which they can
experience their profound grief. There are only two instances in the film in which the
camera comes in for a three quarter close-up, and in both of those instances, the close up
is limited to coming in only from behind, obscuring part of the character’s face. This
occurs in one instance when Máximo says goodbye to Ramón and in the following scene
when he says goodbye to Cándida. In the camera’s distance and refusal to zoom in on
faces, something is kept from the viewer instead of being delivered to the viewer for
consumption. It is a move that suggests intimacy: visually, something is kept sacred and
separate for Cándida, Ramón and Máximo. Additionally, the slow tempo, like a hanging
79
hammock, suspends the gaze in a way that seems to say to the protagonist, “This is your
moment and your grief. Don’t mind the viewer. Take your time and just be with this
emotion. You don’t exist to entertain. You exist to be respected as a human being going
through a tragic challenge.”
Slowness and repetition in the film also have the effect of representing uneven
temporalities simultaneously in a way that resonates with the Paraguayan experience.15
While on one hand, as a medium, film is by definition a forward thrust—a march of
frames imitating the arrow of time, progressing, one upon the other—on the other hand,
the repeated shots coupled with the repetitive, circular conversation that continually
returns to the same topics and words create a sense of time that stands still. Perhaps the
sense of time moving while Paraguay is simultaneously “stuck” in time refers to multiple
elements. In Chapter 3 I analyze a development discourse about Paraguay that
continuously qualifies it as a place that is “fifty years behind the developed world,” but
Hamaca’s slowness and circularity refers to more than that. It recalls a type of
melancholia that dominates Paraguayan History/Present; a state of being “stuck” in
mourning for the massive losses Paraguay has gone through. I explore the implications of
this cyclical whirlpool of time and mourning in Chapter 3, but first, I would like to
explore another implication of Hamaca as a slow film.
15
Temporalities may be experienced differently as a matter of identity. See for example, Cornel
University’s “What is a U.S. American?”
<http://www.isso.cornell.edu/ithacalife/us1.php#Time_Orientation>. Designed to help foreign students
understand U.S. culture, this webpage includes a section on American “Time Orientation:” “Americans
place considerable value on punctuality. Because they tend to organize their activities by means of
schedules, they may seem harried, always running from one thing to the next and unable to relax and enjoy
themselves.” The fact that this section is immediately followed by a section entitled “Doing Rather Than
Being” (i.e. Products over People) reinforces the connection between identity, nationality, capitalism and
how a particular temporality can be experienced. I thank Laura Briggs for bringing this link to my attention.
80
The time of capitalism is produced, measured and controlled by and through
productivity and labor. As Karl Schoonover explains in his paper on slow film, “Wastrels
of Time: Slow Cinema and its Laboring Subjects,” a film’s lack of action has the
potential to create a space for ambiguity by producing an actor/spectator labor reversal.
Whereas capital-driven film production creates action/labor for the audience to consume
somewhat passively, the slow film does less of the labor for the audience, requiring the
viewer to actively focus and make sense of the non-action, (or as in the case of Hamaca,
the unspoken speech action.) This makes watching into work.16 The slow film is resistant
to capitalist production of action, and in this sense one could call it “unproductive.”
Schoonover argues that this slowing/diminishing of film action could point us towards a
“queer materialism of slowness.” Presented with this framing, I believe the metaphor
could be extended from “unproductive” to encompass a type of “non-reproductive”
element as well, particularly given that in the case of Hamaca, the couple’s only
offspring is killed/never visibilized.
Schoonover also discusses how in Italian Neorealism, the neorealist body does not
require a performance; its body is its performance (i.e. scars, gauntness from famine.)
Neorealism’s influence on Latin American film (through Fernando Birri and others) is
well documented. It follows, then, that Hamaca’s actors do less acting and more being:
Ramón’s wrinkles and Cándida’s white hair mark their bodies with the passage of time
while their stories highlight a state of being caught in a temporal whirlpool.
16
For an article on how for some, slow film is the no-fun equivalent of “eating your cultural vegetables,”
see http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/05/movies/films-in-defense-of-slow-and-boring.html?_r=1
81
Returning to the formal element of Hamaca’s unspoken speech acts, what are the
implications of the fact that no “speaker” ever moves their mouth in this film? In the
vegetable-animal-human continuum of subjectivity, personhood is attained through proof
of the cognitive capacity to speak. This reminds us of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Can
The Subaltern Speak?” Spivak argues that the Other as Subject is inaccessible to the
intellectual and extends her critique to the work of the Subaltern Studies Group. She
problematizes their reappropriation of Antonio Gramsci’s term subaltern in order to
identify a “voice” or “collective locus of agency” in postcolonial India. The problems
with intellectuals re-presenting a collective subaltern speech are: a) a logocentric
assumption of homogeneous cultural solidarity among a heterogeneous people and b) a
legitimization of Western intellectuals as the “voice” of the subaltern condition. This
positionality reifies the subaltern condition as subordinate. In this sense, the fact that
Hamaca’s characters are speaking and are not speaking at the same time could indicate
the very situation that Spivak draws attention to. We might think of the plight that we see
represented, but also, of what the Western intellectual’s work (a film, a dissertation)
cannot say about the consciousness of the subaltern (campesino). In an attempt to make a
film about Paraguayan national identity, by making it impossible for the protagonists to
speak, the film calls attention to the fact of its own project’s impossibility: the attempt to
present one family’s story as the story of a larger, heterogeneous people, and the attempt
of a privileged intellectual to “voice” the subaltern condition.
The topic of speech/non-speech brings us to the issue of presence/absence around
which Hamaca is formally constructed. Máximo is perhaps the most subaltern of the
82
three protagonists, being the one who is ultimately violently sacrificed for the nation. He
is also the character whose body is never present. In a sense, by making Máximo
invisible, Hamaca responds to violence against his body with a symbolic language of
anti-corporeal gestures. As Megan Lorraine Debin argues in reference to Mexican
performance artists who respond to violence in their work, “The trace of the absent body
is where the trauma of physical violence is rendered most visible,” (2). Working off of
Peggy Phelan’s Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, Debin builds upon Phelan’s
assertion that “visibility is a trap” because it “summons surveillance and the law; it
provokes voyeurism, fetishism, and the colonialist/imperialist appetite for possession,”
(65). By keeping Máximo invisible, through the power of the trace, Hamaca is able to
highlight the violence to which he (and by allegorical extension, the Paraguayan people)
has been subject in a less corruptible way.
As Ana M. López describes in “An ‘Other’ History: The New Latin American
Cinema”
When the term [New Latin American Cinema] is used today it always
implies a socio-political attitude that constitutes the principal source of
unity for these films and practices. That attitude can be summarized as a
desire to change the social function of the cinema, to transform the
Latin American cinema into an instrument of change and
consciousness-raising or concientización. (138-139)
Although today López discusses a New New Latin American Cinema with different
characteristics, Hamaca definitely falls under the New Latin American Cinema category
83
in the way that López describes: it privileges concientización as a goal. Instead of
producing scenes that are easily consumed, it in fact constitutes a film that can be
qualified as difficult, challenging, or even unpleasant to watch, and in the process, force
the viewer to invest more effort and critical thought into making sense of what they are
watching. The slowness and the circularity of the actions/conversations (constant returns
to talking about how the dog is barking or not, whether it will rain or not, how their son
might be alive or not) potentially make the viewer experience frustration or even
desperation and hopelessness. This is not the terrain of the box-office smash; this is an
invitation to feel what it might be like to fight to keep hope alive for hope’s sake after
everything else is gone.
Representation as The Counting of Those Who Don’t Count
In her chapter on “Early Cinema and Modernity in Latin America,” Ana López
comments on how the European elite minority, (not the majority indigenous population),
controlled Latin America at the time that the cinematic apparatus arrived (as early as
1896). “Thus, it is not surprising that the ‘modernity’ of early cinema echoed more
resoundingly—and lastingly—in Buenos Aires and Rio than in Lima, since even the
simple films shown at these first screenings already exemplified a particularly modern
form of aesthetics responding to the specificity of modern urban life,” (211). This story
about the foundation of Latin American Cinema is congruous with audiovisual
84
production and broadcast tendencies in Paraguay, which have been traditionally
dominated by urban, modernizing and white images. In fact, Paraguay’s first television
station, Sistema Nacional de Televisión (SNT) was founded by the Stroessner regime as a
populist arm that could transmit political messages to the nation—specifically,
modernizing and whitening ones. Being that there was virtually no audiovisual
production in Paraguay at the time of the founding of SNT, the majority of programming
was foreign. As López explains:
The cinema experienced by Latin Americans was—and still is—predominately
foreign. This is a factor of tremendous significance in the complex development
of indigenous forms, always caught in a hybrid dialectics of invention and
imitation, as well as in the development of the form of experience—mass
spectatorship—necessary to sustain the medium. (213)
In this sense, Hamaca Paraguaya’s win at Cannes has meant something tremendous for
the nation culturally: resistance to the Hollywood form, as I have discussed, but also the
birth of “la primera película paraguaya” as director Ramiro Gómez qualifies it in his OpEd: “No se descartan los esfuerzos anteriores por hacer cine. Ocurre que con ‘Hamaca
Paraguaya’ el 100% del elenco de actores, el guión, la dirección y parte del presupuesto
son paraguayos. Dando origen a la primera película auténticamente paraguaya. A mi
criterio.”17 What does finally having a place on international screens do for a national
17
Just as Gómez is committed to Hamaca’s paraguayidad, there are other directors, such as Pablo Meileke,
who are equally adamant that Hamaca cannot constitute an “authentically” Paraguayan film because the art
director, director of photography, producers, etc. are not Paraguayan nationals. The film is technically a coproduction between five countries: France, The Netherlands, Argentina, Germany, Paraguay and Spain. In
Chapter 4 I problematize the rigidity of the foreign/Paraguayan film binary, making the case for
audiovisual production in Paraguay as a dominantly transnational form.
85
conscience heavy with invisibility?18 In terms of invisibility, I couple national invisibility
on transnational screens with campesino/mestizo invisibility on national screens. While
there have been some exceptions, historically, all types of media in Paraguay have
dominantly featured urban, light-skinned protagonists. Referring specifically to 1890’s
Buenos Aires, López comments on the protagonism of urban, light-skinned elites:
Clearly invoking another kind of desire or ‘attraction’, these notices
posited spectatorial position predicated on identification and selfrecognition, which was but an embryonic form structure, the appeal was
not just that one would see ordinary Buenos Aires citizens but socially
prominent ones—metaphorical stand-ins for the nation itself. (218)
What Hamaca does differently is take the satisfaction of self-recognition to rural, brownskinned people by making them protagonists and by allegorical extension, by making
them the “metaphorical stand-ins for the nation itself.”19 This reversal of who gets to
represent the nation could be seen as powerfully subversive.20 In The Wrenched of the
Earth Fanon stresses the revolutionary potential of the campesino: “The peasantry is
systematically left out of most of the nationalist parties’ propaganda. But it is obvious
that in colonial countries only the peasantry is revolutionary. It has nothing to lose and
18
An example of Paraguay’s international invisibility can be read through this recent newspaper article
heralding a few thirty second touristic spots on Paraguay programmed for broadcast on CNN International:
http://www.abc.com.py/nota/paraguay-recorre-el-mundo-desde-la-senal-de-cnn/
19
Encina was very concerned with making sure the film made it to rural Paraguayan audiences. She took a
cine-móvil to three rural locations to conduct screenings. In an interview, she told me that she got her best
feedback during these screenings: “Cuando llevé la película al interior, nadie se movió un pelo. Disfrutaron
de la película y me dieron una de las críticas más lindas que recibí en mi vida que es: así somos.”
20
That said, I will challenge the reach of this possible subversiveness in Chapter 4 by historicizing what
Gareth Williams refers to as a Latin American legacy of rhetorical inclusion structured to pacify and help
maintain the status quo.
86
everything to gain” (23). Is there not something revolutionary about an archive of
national film that features a brown population against a history of dominantly white
protagonists? Seen from this perspective, where the campesino becomes the
“metaphorical stand-in for the nation itself,” Paraguayan film’s obsession with
“Paraguayan elements” could be seen not simply as some sort of feverish nationalism, but
rather, as a site of defense against Hollywood imperialism, transnational corporations and
even the corruption of the federal government itself. A “return” to the rural space takes
the anti-modern as the point and constructs, with Hamaca at the helm, a potentially
subversive archive of audiovisual production.
In Disagreement, Jacques Rancière defines democratic politics not as a regime,
but rather, as the conflictual meeting of two heterogeneous logics: domination and
equality. Politics occurs when there is the taking part of those who have no part, when
there is an account of the unaccounted for (the miscount). Hamaca makes a film out of
the struggle of the poorest people of Paraguay’s history while pointing towards their
contemporary counterparts. This, in Rancière ’s sense, is the essence of democratic
politics, as it causes “the poor,” those who were previously invisible, to be visible, to
exist as entity, at least at the level of representation. This “naming of that which cannot
be named” is what Rancière identifies as the heart of democratic politics, and is
something that Hamaca’s aforementioned subversive formal techniques take even further.
By featuring unspoken speech acts, Hamaca demands consideration of the problem of
language itself, which according to Rancière, is always potentially to analyze modes of
subjectivization.
87
A Record of Violence
In the extras of the DVD version of Hamaca, the actor who plays Ramón—
Ramón del Río—is interviewed.21 He cites Paraguayan boom writer, Augusto Roa Bastos:
“El infortunio se enamoró del Paraguay.” He goes on to say “El Paraguay siempre ha sido
azotado, castigado históricamente por un oleaje de infortunio, ya sean por problemas
externos—invasores—tanto como internos: políticos, caciques, criollos de pésimo
gramaje humano.” One of Hamaca’s main accomplishments has to do with the record of
historic cultural violence it presents while allegorically denouncing present sociocultural
problems.
As I described briefly in Chapter 1, there are two main events in Paraguayan
history that have left such a mark on the national imaginary that Paraguayans speak of
them as if they had occurred only yesterday: the Triple Alliance War and the Stroessner
dictatorship. The Triple Alliance War was a devastating event in which nearly half of the
population perished. Historians such as Milda Rivarola and James Schofield Saeger agree
that the president of Paraguay during that time, Francisco Solano López, bore the brunt of
the responsibility for the war and its devastating mismanagement. Not surprisingly, the
second most devastating regime for Paraguay, the Stroessner regime, took on one major
film project: the film Cerro Corá—a film entirely dedicated to re-enforcing a historical
21
It is worth noting that Ramón del Río is most famous for his performance in the theater adaptation of
Agusto Roa Bastos’s novel about the Paraguayan dictator José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, Yo El
Supremo. Paz Encina has admitted that she wrote the role in Hamaca Paraguaya thinking specifically
about del Río, which suggests potentially productive comparisons between the two roles/works.
88
discourse about Francisco Solano López representing him as a national, or rather, the
national hero. Perhaps the regime was hoping that if the people could see López as a
hero beyond the trail of the dead he left behind, then people may also be able to uphold
Stroessner as a hero regardless of his crimes, as well.
The legacy of the Stroessner regime involves a sort of pessimism about the future
and a sort of turning a blind eye toward the violence of the regime in a nostalgic
reminiscence of better times when there was less crime and cheaper food. It is possible to
hear echos of the deterministic attitude toward the future left in the wake of the
dictatorship, and before that, the Triple Alliance War: in the dialogues between Cándida
and Ramón: while people may hope that things can change, will change and perhaps are
about to change in Paraguay, they waver between that hope and hopelessness. If things
have really never changed for the better, how could they ever? The “transition period”
from dictatorship to democracy never truly happened, being that so many of the same
people who were in power during the dictatorship continue to own the majority of the
nation’s wealth and hold political power.
In Hamaca, the constant comments about the rain that never comes represent a
timeless, collective rural life intrinsically subjugated to nature’s indifferent, destructive
force. The futility of fighting nature, however, produces a sense of hopelessness that is
not unlike the dominant pessimism among Paraguayan youth. Professional opportunities
are few in a nation that has an unemployment rate of nearly 20%. As Sonia Brucke of the
Senate’s Cámara de Género points out in a personal interview, Paraguay’s income
inequality metrics are the highest in South America, comparable to those of Haiti. (Its
89
Gini Coefficient was a whopping 53.2 in 2009, ranking Paraguay as the 15th most
unequal nation in the world.22) 90% of the national territory is owned by about 5% of the
population; roughly 12 families. Foreign and local investors alike are discouraged from
attempting projects that would provide jobs because there is little security for their
investments given the level of corruption of the police and the legal system. For people
who are not already among the most privileged, waiting for opportunity to knock is
indeed much like waiting in the dark for a desperately needed rain that never comes.
However, in Hamaca Paraguaya there is something even more pressing than the
wait for rain; it is the wait for the couple’s son, Máximo, to return from war. In their
dialogue the couple, Cándida and Ramón, go back and forth between hopefulness that
Máximo will return and hopelessness. In one conversation, Ramón says, “Doesn’t that
seem odd to you? That we the poor are always at war?” And in this border war with
Bolivia, Cándida does not encourage Máximo to protect Paraguay; quite the contrary. She
discourages him from fighting at all and pleads with him to hide, hoping to get him home
alive. Although the film may aesthetisize rural labor as it constructs paraguayidad, it
constructs a paraguayidad that is not uncritical of the ruling class and the national
situation of extreme inequality. In fact, the plight of the poor is presented by Hamaca as a
true tragedy for the couple, and by extension, it can be seen as a pessimistic forecast for
Paraguay’s future, given that Máximo does in the end, die at war. Their son—symbol of
the future of the people—dies, while Paraguay the nation wins the war. Paraguay’s
nation-form maintains its access to the global economy, but in 2012 this access benefits
22
See https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2172rank.html.
90
only a small, powerful minority while the “ordinary people” continue in poverty and in
precariedad; a term that designates their limited access to functioning social services. It
is popular opinion that Paraguay’s overall economy does not benefit from Paraguay’s
involvement in MERCOSUR for example, but select people are making money off of this
involvement. It is also true that while Paraguay’s macroeconomic improvement over the
last decade has made it the least indebted nation in South America with an ever-growing
GDP thanks to booming exports such as raw soy bean, unemployment has risen and the
minimum wage has not kept up with rising costs. There continue to be only a few lowfunctioning social programs. Generally speaking, as Paraguay the Nation gets richer,
Paraguay’s poor get poorer.
The Mechanics of Allegory, Mourning and Temporal Marks
Film and documentary production in Paraguay are no exception to the “rule” of
“third world” text and allegory read for national and ethnic content, a rule Fredric
Jameson describes in his classic essay, “Third-World Literature in the Era of
Multinational Capitalism.” In the case of Hamaca, the struggle of the entire pueblo
paraguayo is told through the story of a couple and the son they lost at war. Is the use of
this allegorical form indeed reifying the Western critic’s belief that the nation form is all
third world texts can be about, or does it open a space for something else?
In Idelber Avelar’s The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction
and the Task of Mourning, he explores the possibilities of the allegorical form and how it
91
is related to the task of mourning. On one hand, Avelar privileges the allegorical form as
“a trope that thrives on breaks and discontinuities, as opposed to the unfractured
wholeness presupposed by the symbol” (11). This description would seem to promise a
fertile space of slippage for the allegory. On the other hand, however, Avelar describes
allegory as “the aesthetic face of political defeat…Ruins are the raw material that
allegory possesses at its disposal” (69). Certainly, Hamaca would seem to represent a
classic case of ruins spun into art. If allegory is the language of defeat and “The language
of defeat can only narrate the radical immanence of defeat” (74), how could Hamaca’s
allegorical form signal any revolutionary potential?
One could argue that Hamaca’s allegorical form encourages us to read it against
itself. The aforementioned unspoken speech acts that point toward the impossibility of
the subaltern subject’s self-representation are in keeping with the allegorical form’s
limitations as described by Avelar: “allegories of dictatorship narrate nothing but their
powerlessness to read their object” (76). Perhaps allegory cannot say what anything is,
but only what it is not, as Walter Benjamin points out in The Origin of German Tragic
Drama; “Allegory…means precisely the non-existence of what it presents.” In this sense,
Hamaca makes the only responsible move that a representation of a class can make: it
signals its own impossibility through its form.
Through Benjamin, Avelar argues that to explore the allegorical form is also to
explore mourning. Hamaca’s linking of allegory and mourning is evident in both its form
and content. Parallel to the impossibilities of representation, Avelar argues that mourning
also poses itself as an unrealizable task; as a process that is never completed (5). Perhaps,
92
for this reason, “The imperative to mourn is the postdictatorial imperative par excelance”
(3). If in a sense, the dictatorship in Paraguay has not ended, because the same
individuals continue to exploit the nation (in the name of democracy now), then el
pueblo’s mourning of their lot can only continue to be active and present in all art.
To take a very specific example of the connection between allegory and mourning
in Hamaca, I choose to highlight the object as Avelar does through Benjamin: “The
mournful subject who confronts the loss of a loved being displays a special sensitivity
towards objects, articles of clothing, former positions, anything that might trigger the
memory of the one who died” (3-4). In this sense, the object becomes the allegorical
stand-in for the lost person. In Hamaca, Máximo’s dog becomes this object. She
belonged to Máximo. When Ramón hears that the war has ended and the possibility that
his son will not return becomes more likely, he urges the vet to save the dog that
previously he did not even bother to give water. More explicitly related to Avelar,
however, are the articles of clothing that are mentioned in the film. At one point Cándida
says that she has put Máximo’s grandfather’s poncho in Máximo’s bag to take to war. We
get an idea that the significance of including this poncho, even though it is very hot out,
has to do with creating some sort of presence or summoning of the dead grandfather—
perhaps for spiritual protection or company as Máximo moves into the afterlife. Articles
of Máximo’s clothing are important from the beginning of the film when the couple
discusses giving the dog one of Máximo’s old shirts in order to comfort her. Later, when
the messenger comes to announce Máximo’s death, Candida asks for the shirt he was
wearing when he was shot. But then she tells the soldier that all the men around here have
93
the same name and probably that Máximo was not her son. She then tells the messenger
to get rid of that old shirt. Candida does not want the substitute: she wants her son back.
In a way, Hamaca Paraguaya, the film itself, is activated like an object that
substitutes the lost objects. Its purpose is to trigger the memory of the people who died.
Avelar also explores how allegory maintains an essential relationship with time: “If
mourning is in a fundamental sense a confrontation with time and its passing, allegory, as
the trope that voices mourning, cannot but bear in itself unmistakable temporal marks.”
As I have discussed, temporal marks are a major component of Hamaca, being that it
attempts to represent uneven temporalities simultaneously; a sense of time going by while
Paraguay experiences a state of being “stuck” in mourning for massive historical losses.
Avelar might describe Hamaca’s dual temporality as “a gesture that drags the past out of
its continuum and makes it interpellate the present” (153). If the past is present due to a
violent loss that is still being mourned, what could the future be? Avelar argues that this
interpellation itself creates the potential for the future to become “the arena where the
dead will get another chance to be redeemed” (160). Avelar introduces the question “Can
mourning be an affirmative practice? (138). If the excess displayed by this cinematic
display of grief defies the regulation and subduing of the people, perhaps.
94
Allegory and Gender
So far I have explored how Avelar links allegory, mourning and temporal marks.
In this section I explore how the aforementioned elements can be connected to gender.
Avelar describes the link in the following way:
The control over mimetic practices is thus coextensive with the development of a
number of official rites through which one attempts to curb the display of
mournful grief, primarily identified, in Greek thought and art, with women. As
mourning rituals are, according to Plato, progressively gendered in the feminine,
and women’s acts of mourning increasingly identified with potential disorder,
mimesis is convicted for its complicity with mourning and its refusal to maintain
mourning work within proper, that is, domestic boundaries. (113)
In the Greek discursive tradition that Avelar here describes, the excesses of mourning are
related to women in a way that suggests a subversive threat. Similarly, in Hamaca,
Cándida is the one who encourages Máximo to hide. She cuts through the rhetoric of the
war, saying “Lo único que va hacer esta guerra es quitarte de nuestro lado.” In the only
instance that Ramón addresses gender explicitly, he responds to Candida’s attitude,
telling Máximo that “Tu mamá es mujer mi hijo, no entiende de estas cosas. Pero te tenés
que ir a defender tu patria, vos sos un hombre. Vas a estar bien mi hijo. Y pronto esta
lluvia va a llegar al chaco.” It is noteworthy that Ramón claims Cándida cannot
understand Máximo’s responsibility because she is a woman, when in fact, Cándida was
95
right and Ramón was wrong: their son did not survive, and the rain did not come. From
this angle, it would seem Ramón’s is more susceptible to the falsity of official state
discourse because of his gender position (the man’s role/relationship with his country).
The power of Cándida’s affect—the raw grief of a mother confronting the death of her
son—makes masculinist loyalty to the nation seem foolish and misguided in comparison.
Noche Adentro
Subversion of a power block through an allegorical female character can also be
explored through two short films from the Paraguayan archive: Noche Adentro (2010)
directed by Pablo Lamar and Karai Norte (2009) directed by Marcelo Martinessi.
Noche Adentro begins with a black screen but a lively Paraguayan polka can be
heard in off. The film cuts to an M.C. who makes reference to a bride and groom who are
absent. “¿Quién sabe lo que estarán haciendo?” the M.C. announces coyly. He introduces
a new polka, dedicated by the best men. This one is equally lively but a bit more
dissonant. The musicians play and the wedding party happily dances to the polka,
oblivious of what has transpired between the bride and groom. The film suddenly cuts to
black for several seconds. There is silence. The next shot is a bloody vulva out of focus.
It slowly comes into focus: there is matted pubic hair encrusted with dried blood—and
blood everywhere. The camera pans up the woman’s body. The wedding dress has been
pushed up above her waist. We then see the groom standing nearby. His shirt is bloodstained.
96
In the following scene the groom drags the bride’s body down a staircase, then
down a hall. The audience hears the groom’s heavy breathing and groaning as he
struggles with the bride’s body. As he drags her, he falls backward, her body falling on
him, his white shirt getting progressively filthier. Exhausted, he lays on the floor of the
hallway with her dead body on top of him.
The next scene is the groom undressing completely at the bank of a river. As he
turns and walks towards the camera/canoe on the river, the viewer sees his bloody
genitals. The sound of the water lapping against the canoe is loud. The dead bride lies in
the canoe. The audience sees the groom’s emotionless face as he pushes the canoe down
the river. The camera pans to the dead bride’s face, then down her body, revealing a large
blood stain on her dress, then the black water rippling in the moonlight.
Noche Adentro is a particularly interesting example of a national allegory
inscribed onto a body that is gendered female. In certain ways, the violence of the
Stroessner dictatorship was more visible and overt, whereas the violence and oppression
of the current, so-called democratic regime is less visible and more systemic. By using a
rape allegory to explore the relation of the Paraguayan State to the Paraguayan people,
Noche Adentro makes systemic violence graphically visible and elicits a powerful,
visceral response.
Teemu Ruskola explores the question of what is means to liken a state to a person
and to liken its conduct to rape in his article, “Raping Like a State.” Ruskola describes
the normative masculinity attributed to sovereign states and asserts that “Sexual,
gendered, and racial metaphors continue to structure uneven global relations even today”
97
(1478). Ruskola stresses the impossibility of isolating discrete discourses of gender,
sexuality and race given how they are historically constituted in relation to each other. He
goes on to demonstrate how “… political communities in different parts of the world fell
short of the European ideals of masculinity and homosocial honor, which in turn gave
rise to distinct rhetorics of sexual violation” (1483), specifically exploring examples of
how Oriental civilizations were viewed as effete and not masculine enough, and therefore,
“rapable.”
Although Noche does not constitute an example of state-on-state homoerotic
violation, extending the question of what makes a state rapable to what makes a pueblo
rapable provides us with productive allegorical results. In Noche’s “state on pueblo”
heterosexual violation and homicide, Paraguay’s pueblo is the bride and the State (more
specifically, the network of politicians and businessmen who run it) is the groom (and
perhaps also the best men). Just as Ruskola demonstrates how trade, by definition,
constituted a form of consensual “intercourse” between states, there is a “right of
intercourse” between the state and its pueblo, just as there would be between a bride and
groom. In Noche, however, instead of an exchange of pleasure, the groom’s “pleasure”
seems to only be satisfied by the complete extinguishing of the bride. The romance script
that describes the type of sexual exchange between partners on their wedding night might
involve romance, affection, talk of love, and the giving and receiving of pleasure. It is
assumed that intercourse on a wedding night would happen through mutual consent. In
evoking the wedding night and the assumption of consent, the allegorical reading of
Noche echoes the neoliberal discourse of “personal responsibility” or even, “true
98
economic liberalism” which “requires a consent that is given voluntarily. Once obtained,
consent in turn justifies anything, or as Hobbes put it, ‘Nothing done to a man by his own
consent can be injury’” (1509). Similarly, the allegorical reading of Noche demonstrates
how, because of this relationship of consent, the Paraguayan State has been able to
exploit, oppress or “rape” the Paraguayan people without facing any consequences. This
rape has been as normalized as heterosexual sex on a wedding night.
Somehow the rape and murder of the bride are made even more gruesome by the
fact that the perpetrator is the groom and the crime is committed on their wedding night.
The situation seems to suggest that the State’s role to the people should be one of
protection and service, and for that reason, the acts of violence and exploitation are even
more heinous. The groom’s grunting as he drags the body down the hallway, a scene that
finally ends with the groom collapsing under the weight of the bride’s corpse, is a
macabre parallel to the type of moaning and coupling of bodies that the audience would
otherwise expect. Night, or Noche, is everywhere: in the sky without light, the black
water of the river that washes away the crime by carrying the evidence off into the night,
but most importantly, inside—Adentro.
While attempting to create a type of record of violence in a manner similar to the
way Hamaca constitutes a record of violence, Noche does more to highlight what we
might interpret, allegorically, as the oblivion of the general populace. While the rape,
murder and hiding of the evidence takes place, the wedding party happily dances to a
polka. The only ones who seem to have some awareness of the situation are the best men;
their complicity is suggested in the dedication of the dissonant, ominous tune. The best
99
men represent the behind-the-scenes corruption of nepotism, clans, and family-centered
behavior that guarantee the majority of political and business deals in Paraguay.
The allegorical script about the Paraguayan State that is implicit, but less direct,
has to do with the History of Paraguay. What would drive a groom to commit such a
heinous act? Perhaps some abuse that he himself endured. Similarly, the Paraguayan
State’s historical relationship with its neighbors constitutes a homoerotic violation. In
fact, in the case of the Triple Alliance War, it constitutes a gang rape between Brazil,
Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. In this war over 300,000 Paraguayan civilians died—
the largest amount of casualties reported in South American military history. (It is widely
believed, although not supported, that 90% of the male population perished in this war.)
Seeing the war from this angle makes it a male (States)-on-male (State/populace)
violation. The Paraguayan State’s wounded psyche and masculinity then in turn cause it,
as a subjugated state, to want to become a violator itself. Paraguayan film illustrates the
narrative construction of Paraguayan History as the haunting that Paraguayan corruption
has never escaped. But if Paraguay has never escaped, does that mean it will never escape?
Does stressing a violent history create the expectation of a violent future? Ruskola insists
that “[T]he rape script[s], or the narrative construction of certain entities as subjects of
violation…did not simply reflect the material violence of colonial relations; they played a
key role in enabling it” (1484). Does Paraguay’s rape script convince the resistant to
abandon revolution before it can even begin? Does it teach us that defeat is always
already here?
100
Karai Norte
Karai Norte (2009) directed by Marcelo Martinessi, is a black and white short film
adaptation of a short story, “El arribeño del norte,” published in by Carlos Villagra
Marsal. It shares themes with Hamaca Paraguaya and Noche Adentro in the sense that it
protagonizes an aesthetisized rural poor. In all three films poor protagonists are the
victims of some grave injustice. Specifically in Noche Adentro and Karai Norte, an
unlikely (and therefore all the more distasteful) rape takes place.
Karai Norte begins with a shot of dry, cracked earth and cuts to the back of an
elderly woman’s head, her grey hair in a bun. It cuts then to a quick view of her little hut
in the dry, windy landscape. The woman makes mate cocido at a fire. The wind blows
noisily. The sound of a man arriving on horseback and calling out can be heard in off.
The woman is afraid, she hides. The next shot is her outside, holding her hands up. She
tells the traveler to take whatever he wants. He tells her he is only hungry. Her hands
tremble. He insists she must have something. She asks where he comes from, and he
points north. She says she will see if she can at least find an egg. She looks north again;
there is nothing to be seen but a clearing and a tree line in the distance. The next shot is
the man resting in a chair, his saddle sitting nearby. He whistles a polka. The next shot is
him asleep, fallen over in his chair. The doña gives his horse water and pets it. She wakes
up the visitor to offer him the plate of food she has prepared. She asks him to eat outside,
but he says it is better to eat indoors as the north wind is too strong. As he eats, we see
the doña from above and behind again. She pulls the bobby pins out of her bun and lets
down her long, grey hair to braid it. She apologizes for the food as the meat is a little
101
“passed.” The man says the meat is fine like that. He would have hunted on the road, but
he was busy. “Are you being chased?” she asks. He doesn’t answer, but freezes. He
finishes his meal and offers to pay her something. She refuses to take it and explains that
if he leaves money here, it will likely be stolen. She then describes how bandits came to
steal the few things she had: her oil lamp, her clothes, and her machete among them. She
also refers to how they pushed her on the bed and held her down. “Did they touch you?”
he asks. She does not answer; she simply looks stoically over the dry landscape. “La
revolución ya terminó ¿verdad?” she asks. “Ya terminó hace un mes,” he responds. “¿Y
entonces por qué siguen persiguiendo y perjudicando así a los pobres?” she asks. “Esos
que vinieron eran rebeldes o eran fuerzas del gobierno?” the stranger inquires, to which
she replies “No sé, parece que fueron mis vecinos no más. . . . A media legua de aquí está
el puesto de los Cuellar, gente mala como ninguna. Y a un poco más allá, tiene su chacra
Solano Chamorro, un arriero de la peor calaña. Se decía por ahí que yo tenía plata. Quién
sabe si no fue por eso.”
The visitor rides off, and the woman watches him go, as stark as the landscape
around her. There is a musical interlude, (light harp), and a fade used to indicate that
some time has gone by. The next shot is of her hands folded, of her gnarly feet. The ring
from his plate on the wood is still there. Then the stranger returns with her stolen
belongings. She is pleased to recover her goods. “¿Cómo voy a agradecerle?” she says as
he hands her the goods, one by one. “Y me parece que este es el que le robó,” the stranger
declares as he throws a severed head onto the ground. The women lets out a bloodcurdling scream and the man rides away.
102
Like the bride in Noche Adentro, the frail, elderly woman is an unlikely victim of
rape. In both cases, rape is only a part of the crime: Noche’s crime involves homicide and
the rape in Karai seems to be an afterthought compared to the theft. The noteworthy
difference in Karai Norte has to do with the ambiguity about who the perpetrators were.
This complicates possible allegorical readings. To begin with, it is unclear whether the
man from the north is a “good guy” or a “bad guy.” He is evasive about where he comes
from and what the conditions of his journey are. Yet despite being
exploited/pillaged/raped by strangers, the woman decides to feed this new stranger.
Perhaps she finds the strength to trust again, but the more likely explanation is that she
knows she has no real choice: the stranger is stronger than her and armed. Brute force
reigns in this lawless, barren land, yet the empty landscape seems to denote a peaceful
solitude. The woman’s hand and hair seem to hold the same stark and weathered beauty
of the landscape and the rugged, rustic shack that sits on it.23
Not only is the stranger from the north’s background dubious, he becomes the
hero of the story through a crime: homicidal revenge on the rapist/thief. If we were to
liken him to the State, he would be most representative of the mano dura politics of past
dictatorships: an authoritarian figure who disregards the law himself, but dispenses rigid
and violent “justice” on people who threaten the dictatorship’s “order.” Making him into
the hero would be in line with the nostalgic “Éramos felices y no lo sabíamos” discourse.
The ambiguity about the identity and motivation of the perpetrators is most
evident in the woman’s recounting of the crime. When the stranger asks her “Esos que
23
I explore the implications of narrative connections between the rural campesino and the land in Chapter 3.
103
vinieron eran rebeldes o eran fuerzas del gobierno?” she replies “No sé, parece que
fueron mis vecinos no más…” By allegorical extension, the “bad guys” are neither the
State (fuerzas del gobierno) nor those who would attempt to topple it (rebeldes), but
rather, vecinos: her very countrymen, the pueblo itself.
A gender analysis of Hamaca Paraguaya, Noche Adentro and Kara’í Norte
demonstrates the connections between gender, allegory, mourning, and temporal marks.
The body, gendered female, represents a site for potential disorder and systemic reversal.
In Hamaca, it is Cándida, as mother, who is able to cut through the rhetoric of war: her
grief making masculinist loyalty to violence and the nation into a foolish, misguided and
empty calling. Noche Adentro presents a bride’s body as the site in which systemic State
violence is represented by a graphic and powerful visual allegory made all the more
shocking through its juxtaposition with the romance script. Similarly, Karai Norte sparks
outrage through the figure of an elderly, poor woman, who is raped by thieves. In this
case, denunciation is not aimed strictly at the State, but rather, at everyone who is
complicit with the oppression of the poor (she suspects locals were the perpetrators of the
crime). Although these instances feminize victimization with powerful results, their
resistant potential is ambiguous, given the tradition of situating gender within the
domestication of national time. Anne McClintock describes how women have been
represented as the “authentic body of national tradition” while men represent “the
progressive agent of national modernity.” In this sense, one must ask if the use of the
body gendered female for allegorical purposes is not in line with melancholic cycle that
104
actually refuses the substitution of the historic position of inescapable exploitation and
victimization.
105
CHAPTER 3: … AND ITS IMPOSSIBILITY
Periodization is inevitable but never innocent.
Teemu Ruskola, “Raping Like a State”
Thus far I have described Hamaca Paraguaya’s potential for resistance through
formal subversion, historical revisionism, a self-reflexivity that acknowledges the
problems of subaltern representation and political denunciation. In this chapter it is not
my intention to downplay the importance of the aforementioned achievements, but rather,
to describe the palimpsest against which Paraguayan film is necessarily constructed and
how it bleeds through into this cultural product.24 Unfortunately, not even the most wellintentioned director can keep their film from being the product of power negotiations
between local and national identities and transnational practices at the levels of
production and consumption.
The Campesino Protagonist and the Rural Space
Hamaca Paraguaya constitutes part of an archive of Paraguayan works that have
similar characteristics: it has won competitive funding or awards at international film
festivals; it takes the rural mestizo campesino figure as its protagonist; the dialogue of this
film is entirely in Guaraní, the indigenous language of Paraguay; and the daily labor that
makes up rural living constitutes the majority of the action of the film.
24
I thank Laura Briggs for applying this fitting metaphor to my work.
106
When I began studying this archive, it struck me that so many young, urban,
middle to upper class directors were taking the campesino as their protagonist. When I
asked Paz Encina why she chose to set her film in the rural space, she responded that she
had no family farm in the countryside or anything of the like. “No me preguntes cómo me
involucré en el campo…es algo que me salió. Todos los paraguayos estamos metidos de
alguna manera en el campo.”
I asked director Pablo Lamar, who also demonstrates a preference for the rural
space in his works, a similar question: do you believe your work reproduces a
Paraguayan “essence”? He responded in the following way:
Una cosa que no me interesa es el folklorismo. Me parece una imagen
totalmente plana que sólo logra reproducir estereotipos . . . [pero en mi
trabajo] los tiempos son muy paraguayos. . . . Yo no sé si la representación
es de lo que somos hoy en día. Está muy ligada a esa imagen, que es muy
seductora, con un polvito del pasado. A mí una cosa que me molesta . . . es
una visión extranjera sobre nosotros otra vez . . . Esa visión extranjera se
queda en una extravagancia (i.e. La Burrerita) … a eso llamo
folklorismo . . . Para mí el folklore hace parte fuertísimo de la identidad
cultura paraguaya . . . pero siento que el arte ha sido relegado al folklore
nada más. No digo que el folklore sea algo menos, pero que haya algo más.
Lamar’s words reveal a tension. On one hand, he refers to not wanting to enter into a folk
territory that John Mraz might describe as the picturesque. Lamar also alludes to the
desire to evade the anthropological gaze (“una visión extranjera sobre nosotros otra vez”)
107
and also, the nostalgic temporal mark of the past on Paraguayan cultural products (“ese
polvito del pasado”). On the other hand, Lamar admits to wanting to achieve a
“Paraguayan time” in his work, and admits to the importance and value of Paraguayan
folk production.
Néstor García Canclini’s work on national cultural patrimony in Hybrid Cultures
is also useful for thinking about why Paraguayan directors demonstrate clear concern
about stereotypes yet feel there are certain “Paraguayan elements” that must make up the
raw material of their work. If we consider elements of Paraguayan rural life as part of the
national patrimony, Canclini’s words resonate in a particular way:
Precisely because the cultural patrimony is presented as being alien to
debates about modernity, it constitutes the least suspicious resource for
guaranteed social complicity. The group of goods and traditional practices
that identify us as a nation or as a people is valued as a gift, something we
receive from the past that has such symbolic prestige that there is no room
for discussing it. . . . it occurs to almost no one to think about the social
contradictions they express. (108)
In Chapter 4 I include a more extensive exploration of the concept of “authenticity” in
film in Paraguay, but parenthetically I would like to mention that in reading interviews
with directors I was able to identify a concern with authenticity in regards to cultural
purity. As Hybrid Cultures evidences, discourses of cultural purity are associated with the
past and cultural “contamination” is associated with modernity. Perhaps directores
comprometidos like Encina and Lamar feel they have no choice but to emplot their stories
108
rurally. To enter the conversation about social problems in Paraguay necessarily means to
enter into dialogue with the national patrimony, which is constituted, in part, by the rural
space itself. Canclini states that “Faced with the ‘catastrophes’ of modernization … the
countryside and its traditions will represent the last hope for redemption” (109). In the
case of Paraguay, national “catastrophes” are as much a part of the past (the Triple
Alliance War) as they are of “modernity” (the Gini coefficient), but even so, it would
seem that at the level of representation, post-dictatorial redemption somehow requires the
rural space. That said, according to Renato Rosaldo in the foreword to Hybrid Cultures,
Canclini also contends that “Latin American nation-states … attempt to be both modern
and culturally pure led to metaphysical versions of the nation’s historical patrimony that
did more to justify present domination than they did to describe the past” (xiii). What are
the effects of “being modern” (creating a new film archive) while being “culturally pure”
(insisting on Paraguayan “authenticity”)?
Who is this mestizo campesino figure the Paraguayan archive is so obsessed with?
Mestizo discourse in Paraguay does not have the type of history that was so important to
Mexico with José Vasconselos’s raza cósmica conception, for example. In fact, racial
discourse is mostly absent from official Paraguayan politics: public discourses of race are
substituted by language politics. As the language of 70-80% of the population, Guaraní
earned its “rightful place” as an official language in 1992. According to linguists like
Tadeo Zarratea, however, the lack of real accommodations for Guaraní-speaking
monolinguals (such as bilingual government employees or translators) "convirtió a los
monolingües guaraní en el grupo menos desarrollado y en el más explotado
109
económicamente" (Última Hora). It is noteworthy that dialogue for Paraguayan films is
usually written in Spanish by urbanites who do not have the type of fluency required to
produce natural-sounding Guaraní conversations. The dialogue is then translated into
Guaraní and Spanish subtitles are added. The second and third most popular subtitles to
add, which are frequently required for film festival competition, are English and French.
What does it mean that Guaraní is the dominant language for Paraguayan film, but it can
only be properly employed through translation? What does it mean that Paraguayan film
exalts the Guaraní language, but Guaraní monolinguals are some of the most at-risk
individuals in Paraguay today?
Instead of attempting to identify and define the “true” rural campesino here, I
believe it is more productive to explore how this rural, mestizo, campesino figure is
constructed in the archive at the level of representation. Hamaca Paraguaya and Karai
Norte, for example, construct the campesino icon as elderly, connected to nature, laboring
and mystical. The couple, Cándida and Ramón, look like they might be in their late
seventies, whereas the doña of Karai Norte looks to be in her eighties or nineties, perhaps.
The couple from Hamaca emerges from the forest to set up their hammock in a small
clearing; they have come from nature and by nature they are framed. Their conversation
is dominated by nature as they wait for rain and discuss the possibilities of it falling.
Similarly, Karai Norte’s doña is shot in a constant juxtaposition with the cracked, dry
earth and the relentless winds that whip across the clearing on which she lives. Both films
include shots of these characters practicing different sorts of aesthetisized labor.
110
Paraguay’s otherness is constructed similarly to the way John Mraz describes the
picturesque in representations of Mexican identity in Looking for Mexico. He describes
the problems of the picturesque in the following way:
The picturesque is first of all a political problem, because it is a strategy
by which people whose skins are a bit darker are made to appear a little
less human; those who take the pictures, and see them published, are
somehow more human than those who are in them.… The second problem
with the picturesque is that it favors nature over history, essentialism over
action. People are portrayed as products of nature, passive and quiescent,
incapable of acting in the world, or simply irrelevant. Hence, better a
nostalgia for the past that never existed than efforts to construct a future.
(4)
Some parallels can be made between Mraz’s description of picturesque photography and
film and documentary production in Paraguay. The directors, “those who take the
pictures,” are generally urban and white. Their audiences at film festivals are generally
also urban and privileged. The campesinos depicted in Hamaca Paraguaya, however,
are arguably “less human” because they are hypernatural (so linked to nature at a
mystical level that makes them nearly supernatural.) Hamaca’s characters are “less
human” in a way that is perhaps not quickly recognizable because they are beyond human.
The passivity or incapacity for action is also a primary feature of Hamaca’s campesinos.
111
In fact, much of their time is spent doing nothing; just sitting; suspended in the hammock
and suspended in time.25
When asked about the inclusion of rural elements as obligatory for a “winning”
formula, particularly at international film festivals, director Augusto Netto described the
phenomenon to me as a type of identitarian polarity or Orientalism. As Netto states
recounting the French sentiment at a transcontinental film production meeting:
Europeans will tell you straightforwardly ‘We want to see certain topics
from you and we are not interested in seeing other topics from you. If you
try to make a film like one that the Americans or we do better, we are not
interested. Now, if you try to show me something that I as a viewer do not
have or do not know of, yes, that is interesting.’ Paraguayan cinema is
under pressure. There is no Paraguayan identity formulated from the
inside.
Netto’s anecdote echoes Rey Chow in her book on Chinese cinema, Primitive Passions:
“[W]e must prove ‘from within’ that we are worthy of that foreign gaze and that if we do
it properly, the foreign devil will look closely and deeply ‘inside’ us for our authentic
value” (156, italics mine). Mary Louise Pratt might refer to this phenomenon as
“autoethnography,” which “colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways
that engage with the colonizer’s own terms,” and which constitutes “a group’s point of
entry into metropolitan literate culture” (Chow, 38). In “Time Zones and Jetlag: the
flows and phases of world cinema” Dudley Andrew describes how funds like Hugo Bals
25
I thank Araceli Masterson for encouraging me to think more about the materiality of the hammock itself.
112
provide seed money for film projects Rotterdam has a stake in. In this sense, festivals are
not only awarding films, but having a hand in commissioning the very films to be
awarded. That said:
Even without direct festival support, producers and directors today are
tempted to shape their work to appeal to the taste of those deciding which
films get selected . . . Moreover, festivals find themselves in league with
advertising and distribution, since films that play well (or play at all) on
the festival circuit command better DVD deals. (81, Andrew)
While Paraguayan narrative and documentary film is currently about Paraguayan national
identity, this identity can only be established and sanctioned by the “first world” gaze,
whose owners already privilege certain ideas about what “third world” culture should
look like.
The dominance of rural paraguayidad in contemporary Paraguayan film is, among
other things, a sign of what Rey Chow calls cross-cultural commodity fetishism; a
production of value between cultures. Because ethnic practices are theatricalized as
archaic, Hamaca Paraguaya shows a Paraguay that is at once subalternized and
exoticized by the West. The ‘ethnicity’ of the film can be seen as a type of exhibitionism
that returns the gaze of orientalist surveillance, a gaze that demands mythical images and
stories to which convenient, essentialized labels of otherness such as “Paraguay” or in
Chow’s cases, “China,” can be neatly attached.
113
When I asked Pablo Lamar about European tastes for particular types of “third
world” films, his response focused less on race and ethnicity and more on a class
differentiation:
En Europa…la receta de la película latinoamericana exitosa de la pobreza y la
miseria y la violencia, a mí no me interesa para nada. Si los personajes son pobres,
bueno, son pobres pero son más que eso, son personajes. Muchas veces lo que se
hace es se estereotipa de una forma muy grande y el pobre parece no poder ser
más que pobre…Hay una cuestión de pornografía de la miseria que muchas veces
se ve con gran éxito afuera. No es de mí interés… En mi trabajo hay una ruralidad
como espacio, pero no pasa por ahí. Creo que la pobreza rural es diferente.
Lamar’s mention of pornografía de la miseria is a direct reference to Glauber Rocha’s
warning about how the graphic effects of extreme poverty had become Brazil’s most
successful filmic export. However, Lamar acknowledges rural poverty in the same
sentence in which he insists on rural poverty’s “difference” from urban poverty. This
demands the question: what makes rural poverty so “different”? Is it not as violent, just
displaying a violence of a different type? Octavio Paz has asked if the Mexican national
intellectual elite’s enchantment with the working people is “a waiver of its own liability
to interrogate the value system that serves as the foundation to the edifice of the ruling
classes” (Tejada, 148). Does Paz’s hypothesis address the question why the Paraguayan
114
archive is virtually unanimous about keeping the stories of the ruling classes off the
table?26
In the previous chapter I have described the dominance of the campesino
protagonist in contemporary national film as what Jacques Rancière might call a political
possibility: the counting of those who do not count. However, I would simultaneously
like to problematize possible claims for mestizo inclusion as a victory for a resistant
hybridity. Although Rosaldo describes the project of Hybrid Cultures as one that is
oppositional to a doctrine of evolutionism that would imply that “social formations at any
single point in time can be ordered chronologically from ancient to modern in a way that
corresponds to a parallel moral ordering from inferior to superior” (xiii), Joshua Lund
makes a solid argument for how Canclini succumbs to exactly this narrative. In The
Impure Imagination: Toward a Critical Hybridity, Lund essentially argues that hybridity,
as Canclini defines it, represents a failure in logic as it celebrates “genre mixing,” which
can only make sense under the presumption that genres (including races) were somehow
“pure” to being with. Lund describes this pitfall as a haunting by a “Eurocentrically
determined logic of race” (xv). Lund also problematizes Canclini’s concept of
“multitemporal heterogeneity” by pointing out the ways in which temporal marks and
race are interrelated.27 Although Canclini presents hybridity as a possibility for
interrogating binarism, Lund sees Canclini’s move as a reification: “[T]he binaristic
choice between hybrid (mixed) or binary (pure/impure) presents itself as if it were, in fact,
26
There is a very notable exception to this rule: The feature-length fiction film Semana Capital directed by
Hugo Cataldo Barudi. I explore how this film queers the archive in detail in a fifth chapter in the book that
this dissertation will eventually become.
27
Lund stresses that “Obviously the critique here is not hybridity the thing or the word, but rather the
mechanisms and processes through which the concept ‘hybridity’ enters into discourse” (xix).
115
a real choice. In doing so, it conceals the fact that hybridity and binarism are functions of
each other,” (33). Is it not possible to simply celebrate mestizo inclusion for hybridity’s
sake: hybridity itself is a complicit conceptualization.
Temporalization, Racialization, and Gendering
What does the marriage of otherness, identity, the past, race and nature achieve,
and why does film seem absolutely stuck on re-creating this marriage over and over again?
As Walter Benjamin demonstrates while analyzing nineteenth-century industrial
capitalism, in order for the “new” to exist the “old” must be constructed. Benjamin
describes how archaic images are produced in order to suggest something historically
new about commodities. Similarly, it is only through the evolutionist-Enlightenment
notion of one, synchronic time progressing to, accumulating upon and being replaced by
the “next” that people are able to make sense of national progress.
Anne McClintock discusses how secularizing time represents three points of
significance for nationalism:
First … the world’s discontinuous nations appear to be marshaled
within a single, hierarchical European ur-narrative. Second, national
history is imagined as naturally teleological, an organic process of
upward growth, with the European nation as the apogee of world
progress. Third, inconvenient discontinuities are ranked and
subordinated into a hierarchical structure of branching time—the
116
progress of “racially” different nations mapped against the tree’s selfevident boughs, with lesser nations destined, by nature, to perch on its
lower branches … (92)
These points of significance reveal discourses of linear time that posit progress from a
European perspective, serving European colonial and post-colonial interests while linking
the past with colonized peoples, specifically those who have been constructed as racially
separate. Under this discourse, theirs becomes a preexisting, original traditional space
acted upon by modernity. The past becomes a passive, non-Western reality upon which
modernizing forces work naturally and independently of any group’s special interests.
Franz Fanon explores discourses of the civilized/primitive binary in Black Skin
White Masks. Similarly to the way in which Benjamin describes the need to produce
antiquity in order to sell “new” commodities, Fanon states that “It is the racist who
creates his inferior” (93). In order for the colonizer to be dominant, s/he must construct a
discourse of inferiority and an Other to apply it to. Fanon explores this process through
his critique of the work of M. Mannoni, who discusses what he refers to as “the
inferiority complex.” Fanon argues that Mannoni naturalizes the inferiority complex by
presenting it as something that antedates colonization. Fanon explains that a Malagasy
past cannot be presented in such a way because since colonization, the Malagasy have
been reconstructed by the European: “What M. Mannoni has forgotten is that the
Malagasy alone no longer exists; he has forgotten that the Malagasy exists with the
European … alterity for the black man is not the black man but the white man” (97).
Fanon reminds us that the Malagasy as we know them are a construct of their colonizers.
117
Despite white dominance, the white perspective is not the universal point of departure nor
should it be normalized as such. Consider the way that Benjamin and McClintock’s work
suggests that the premodern as a coherent cultural sphere does not preexist the modern,
but is instead a discursive construction of modernity itself through recourse to a fictive
space outside itself—defined as its lack. The notion of the pre-modern is a modern
concept retroactively constructed to legitimize modernization in the same way that the
historicized black man in Fanon’s example is constructed retroactively to legitimize
white domination.
In the same vein, Stuart Hall conducts a useful exploration of the construction,
complexity and fluidity of identity. Hall follows Fanon’s point about identities being
fashioned in line with interests of the dominant class. “The ways we have been positioned
and subjected in the dominant regimes of representation were a critical exercise of
cultural power and normalization, precisely because they were not superficial. They had
the power to make us see and experience ourselves as ‘Other’” (706). At the intersection
of Hall and Fanon we find a construction of the Other that is strikingly similar to the
construction of the past presented at the intersection of Benjamin and McClintock. Just as
a person in Fanon’s example experiences her/his own Otherness as vividly as if s/he were
split in two, the dominant regimes of representation present time’s progression as
synonymous with progress in a powerful, universalizing way.
The construction of the Other and the construction of the past are nearly grafted
onto one another in Anne Cheng’s example of “Indian Melancholy:”
118
In Beyond Ethnicity Werner Sollors talks about ‘Indian melancholy,’
referring not to how Native Americans process their history of genocide
but to how dominant American culture romanticizes and naturalizes ‘the
cult of the vanishing Indians.’ The rhetoric of the ‘melancholic Indian
and his fate’ serves to legitimize the future of the white conqueror. (14)
The Indian is seen as static, rooted in the past and passively subjected to the forces of
modernity. The past as something that naturally must be lost, is prescribed as the
temporality of the Indian, who sadly—but inevitably—must fade away, also. Through
this temporal association, dominant white culture does not bare any responsibility for the
marginalization and genocide of indigenous peoples, because it was ‘no one’s fault’ that
they could not adapt to modernity. Fanon describes colonial violence stating that “… I
begin to suffer from not being a white man to the degree that the white man imposes
discrimination on me … tells me that … I must bring myself as quickly as possible into
step with the white world …” (98). If the term “white world” is replaced by the term
“modern world,” white dominance is figured as blameless. Rather, the dominant class can
state that there is a “cultural clash” with progress itself, and progress, being ascribed to
the domain of the impartial and inevitable cannot bear any moral burden. Edmundo
O’Gorman also describes this as a dominant aspect of colonial thought in his book, La
Invención de América:
En este programa de liberación y transformación el indígena quedó al
margen por su falta de voluntad o incapacidad o ambas, de vincularse al
destino de los extraños hombres que se habían apoderado de sus
119
territorios, y si bien no faltaron serios intentos de incorporarlo y
cristianizarlo, puede afirmarse que, en términos generales, fue
abandonado a su suerte y al extermino como un hombre sin redención
posible, puesto que en su resistencia a mudar sus hábitos ancestrales y
en su pereza y falta de iniciativa en el trabajo, se veía la señal inequívoca
de que Dios lo tenía merecidamente olvidado. (157, italics mine.)
Argentine academic Rodolfo Kusch echos the same temporalization of indigenous
thought in El pensamiento indígena y popular en América:
A uniform way of life does not exist in América. The ways of life of the
Indian and the well-off city dweller are impermeable to each other. On
the on hand, the Indian retains the structure of an ancient form of
thinking, a thousand years old, and on the other, the city dweller renews
his way of thinking every ten years. (2)
In the Sollors, O’Gorman and Kusch examples, hegemonic structures are legitimized and
formalized through the characterization of indigenous cultural identities as rooted in the
past. In this way, racial hierarchies are presented as the continuation and repetition of an
always already socially sanctioned structure. The fixed identity constructed for the
oppressed people by the dominant class becomes ever more difficult to question unless
one recognizes that all identity undergoes constant transformation and is subject to power
plays as well.
120
Identity, of course, is not limited to race or ethnicity. Anne McClintock
demonstrates how discourses of time and progress extend not only to race, but to gender
though the domestication of national time:
[T]he temporal anomaly within nationalism—veering between nostalgia
and the impatient, progressive sloughing off of the past, is typically
resolved by figuring the contradiction in the representation of time as a
natural division of gender. Women are represented as the atavistic and
authentic body of national tradition (inert, backward-looking, and
natural), embodying nationalism’s conservative principle of continuity.
Men, by contrast, represent the progressive agent of national modernity
(forward-thrusting, potent, and historic) … Nationalism’s anomalous
relation to time is thus managed as a natural relation to gender. (92)
Time becomes a fetishistic stand-in for the othering of peoples who the dominant class
seeks to repress—including women. A European historicist scheme functions to
universalize a European version of historical experience and inculcate beliefs about
progress, superiority, inferiority and the proper place of racialized and gendered peoples.
“Women were seen not as inhibiting history proper but as existing, like colonized peoples,
in a permanently anterior time within the modern nation” (93) McClintock states.
Anne Cheng helps in the exploration of how these beliefs about race, gender and
the alignment of linear time with progress constitute a melancholic ideological discourse.
Through Freudian psychoanalysis, Cheng presents us with the concept of the melancholia
of race. First, she defines melancholia as follows:
121
In 1917 Freud wrote an essay, “Mourning and Melancholia,” which
proposes two different kinds of grief. According to Freud, “mourning” is
a healthy response to loss … Melancholia, on the other hand, is
pathological. It is interminable in nature and refuses substitution (that is,
the melancholic cannot ‘get over’ loss) … Melancholia thus denotes a
condition of endless self-impoverishment. (8-7)
The loss we are referring to within the context of aforementioned discursive constructs is
two part: on one hand, as Cheng would posit it, the unassimilable racial other is “lost,”
but “The melancholic must deny loss as loss in order to sustain the fiction of possession”
(9). I suggest that the second component of loss here is the loss of the past. The positions
we explore present a completely naturalized binary in which the past is lost yet that loss
is denied by a melancholic upholding of the future as progress.
As Cheng states, “Melancholia offers a powerful critical tool precisely because it
theoretically accounts for the guilt and the denial of guilt, the blending of shame and
omnipotence in the racist imaginary” (12). Any discourse of “underdevelopement stuck
in the past” can be analyzed as a type of melancholia; society cannot get over the loss
brought on by racist violence, and the more we deny the loss, the more we incorporate
further racism by repeating and naturalizing discourses on the linearity of time and its
connection to the static and inferior positioning of oppressed peoples.
In the case of Paraguay’s place within “first world” development discourse,
Paraguay has been racialized as brown, gendered as female, and temporalized in the past;
all identitarian means of domination, as I have explained above. As a nation that is
122
primarily mestizo and bears the mark of Spanish colonization, the connection between
darkness of skin and poverty has been naturalized over centuries. Theft problems are
blamed on traditional Guaraní communal societal structure where private property does
not exist as it does in the West, but rather, all objects belong to the tribe.28 Paraguay has
been infamously gendered as female/inferior as a result of the Triple Alliance War (also
known as the Paraguayan War)29 in which Paraguay staved off Brazil, Argentina and
Uruguay for five years, from 1865-1870. The war cost Paraguay most of its male
population. Women rebuilt the country, and it is widely thought that this moment of
“destruction” of the nation/nuclear family is to blame for many current socioeconomic
problems.30 In John King’s foundational Magical Reels: A History of Cinema in Latin
America there are only a few pages on Paraguayan film. Within those pages, King cites
Paraguayan boom author Augusto Roa Bastos: “The daily routine, the monotonous and
insistent rituals, the power of religion and the grinding poverty are all captured in an
implacable portrait of this ‘land without men and men without land’” (101). The cultural
influence of books written by Roa Bastos and King makes the inclusion of this phrase in
the only three pages dedicated to Paraguayan film all the more striking. Both authors
describe Paraguay as a place of “land without men and men without land,” (in)directly
28
For a brief op-ed that illustrates popular discourse on how Paraguay’s social problems are traceable to its
indigeneity, see “Inventario de un pueblo diferente” by Marzha Navarro
http://www.larueda.com.py/marzhan005.htm
29
I prefer the Paraguayan name for this event: “Triple Alliance War” over “Paraguayan War” because I
believe it is more indicative of the inequity involved in this catastrophic confrontation.
30
For more on this see “Paraiso de Majoma” o “País de las Mujeres”: El rol de la familia en la sociedad
paraguaya del siglo XIX by Barbara Potthast-Jutkeit.
123
linking the feminization (without men) of Paraguay to its situation of poverty and uneven
distribution of wealth (men without land).
Paraguay’s history of dictatorship has also been read by “first world” political
scientists as an indicator of inferiority. As Thomas E. Skidmore and Peter H. Smith have
written about the history of development discourse in the United States:
Implicitly assuming or explicitly asserting that their style of democracy is
superior to all other modes of political organization, North American and
European writers frequently asked what was ‘wrong’ with Latin America. Or
with Latin Americans themselves. What passed for answers was for many
years a jumble of racist epithets, psychological simplifications, geographical
platitudes, and cultural distortions. According to such views, Latin America
could not achieve democracy because dark-skinned peoples … were unsuited
for it … (5-6).
As Idelber Avelar describes it, “[L]iberal democracy emerges as the remedy against
authoritarianism. The self-evidence of the opposition is thus taken for granted” (55).
While “democracy” has been related to “developed” political organization, the U.S.supported coup d'état that overthrew the Stroessner dictatorship continues to be a point of
conflict in Paraguayan society. Many, particularly of the working class, argue that the
uncontrollable increases in crime, corruption and living expenses that the dictator once
predicted upon his ousting have come to pass, and feel they were better off during the
dictatorship.
124
Skidmore and Smith go on to describe how in the 50s and 60s “modernization
theory” appeared, which by name alone situates Latin America in the past while
simultaneously gendering and racializing it, as we can immediately deduce from the
theoretical frames the present/past binary activates. The tenants of modernization theory
described how economic growth would generate social change and therefore, more
“developed” politics. The transition from rural to urban societies would cause an
overhaul of “moral values.” Magically, a larger middle class was prognosticated to
emerge. It was thought that “Latin America and its citizenries were not so inherently
‘different’ from Europe and North America. Instead they were simply ‘behind’” (6) as
Skidmore and Smith explain.
Of course, the predictions of modernization theory did not pan out. How could
they, when the entire theory was based on the logic of the status quo? As Skidmore and
Smith describe, in the 60s and 70s economic gains resulted in even more inequality in
distribution of wealth. Domestic gains were proven not to be able to compete with
transnational capital. The middle class, instead of playing a progressive and moderating
role as predicted, developed a “class consciousness” in which they joined the ruling
classes in opposition to the popular masses. Politics took an authoritarian turn instead of a
democratic one.
Although modernization theory and other grand theories of development have
been generally debunked, dominant neoliberal discourse maintains some of the core
concepts of modernization theory: primarily, the secular faith that unregulated economic
policy is neutral, natural and solves all problems. Just as modernization theory predicted
125
that all Latin American social issues would be resolved with sufficient economic growth,
neoliberalism, as defined by David Harvey, preaches that “human well-being can best be
advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an
institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and
free trade” (2). In this sense, modernization theory is still alive and well. What goes along
with this line of thought is its logical extension: if one is not well-off under neoliberal
rule, it could only be because said individual is simply lacking the motivation to exercise
his or her entrepreneurial freedoms. As Rodolfo Kusch states in Indigenous and Popular
Thinking: “Volition—everyday personal effort—is what will solve all problems” (118).
He then goes on to describe how the downfall of certain criollos in the new world can be
attributed to their passivity: “[T]hey do not exercise their volition in bettering their life
circumstances” (118). The connection between Kusch’s temporalization of Indian
thought, deductions about failure being attributable mainly to lack of will, and the
implications for neoliberal doctrine should not go unnoticed.
To conclude, the text and context of Hamaca Paraguaya represent a valuable
opportunity for understanding how certain themes in narrative and documentary film of
Paraguay have become dominant through national/transnational processes of production
and consumption. While these processes cannot go uninfluenced by the uneven
distribution of wealth under which they are produced and even help to maintain, Hamaca
Paraguaya is an example of a film that plays the field while drawing attention to some of
the very problems of that field. Through the analysis of the text and context of this film,
we are able to explore how points of connection between issues of temporality, race,
126
nationality, gender and class can function as articulations on which coloniality,
postcoloniality and development discourse logics are constructed.
127
CHAPTER 4: FRANKFURT: AUTHENTICITY, TRANSNATIONALITY,
HISTORICAL BORDER WARDS AND GLOBAL NEOLIBERAL CAPITALISM
“Authenticity” and Transnationality
Thus far I have described what I have identified as a trend in filmic production in
Paraguay; a privileging of the topic of rural life, the rural space and rural language
(dialogue mostly if not entirely in Guaraní). In some interviews, directors have directly
framed this as a preoccupation with authenticity; an attempt to represent a “truly”
Paraguayan way of life that is under threat. For example, when I asked Renate Costa why
she chose Villarica as the setting for her short film, Che Yvotymi (2007), she told me she
considered it a “zona auténtica” where people live in pure ways, following traditions in
accordance with true country values. Her response is structured in such a way that
connects the past, the land, and the people who live close to the land (and by extension, in
the past).
One way of reading this rural-centric phenomenon is by thinking of it as a return
to the “origins” of the nation. Paraguayan directors see themselves as creating works now
that are potentially foundational for the Paraguayan film archive. Perhaps this brings up
the question “where do we start?” which leads to the “obvious” answer: “at the
beginning.” If “the beginning” is in the past, one must ask, who is closest to the past? The
uncomplicated answer becomes “those who live in the past/rural space, farthest removed
from the “contaminants” of modernity. In Brett Levinson’s book, The Ends of Literature,
128
he describes a long tradition of “return to origins” narrative in Latin American literature
in general. He sees it not as the result of a loss of origins, as some have theorized, but
rather, as “precisely the incapacity to lose or translate origins. Mexico’s incapacity to rid
itself of its x, for example—makes the return of such origins not a choice but an
obligation, a calling, and a responsibility” (17).
Néstor García Canclini describes the return to the origins as an obligatory move
for any Latin American trafficking in culture. “To be cultured…is to grasp a body of
knowledge—largely iconographic—about one’s own history, and also to participate in
the stagings in which hegemonic groups have society present itself with a scene of its
origin” (109). To “be somebody” in the world of art and culture, one must demonstrate
that s/he is versed in the repertoire of symbolic goods already in circulation. Perhaps
there is even more pressure to deal in these “original” icons in Paraguay, given its history
of military dictatorship. Canclini goes on to describe how “The dramatization of the
patrimony is the effort to simulate that there is an origin, a founding substance, in relation
with which we should act today. This is the basis of authoritarian cultural policies” (110).
Does this constant return to the origins represent a “rut” in which post-dictatorship filmic
production in Paraguay is stuck? Further on in this chapter I will describe how this
melancholic whirlpool applies to the case of audiovisual production in Paraguay.
Another angle from which to study the fetishization of Paraguayan “authenticity”
has to do with the history of dependence that has replaced the story of total isolation and
independence that the Francia years represent. The condition of lack regarding
technological resources (which include training and training opportunities) required to
129
make films has manifested itself in the history of Paraguayan film as a transnational curse:
for most of the dictatorship, Paraguay could only play a supporting role in film through
co-productions. Creative control was mostly in the hands of Argentine directors such as
in the case of El Trueno entre las hojas (1956), La Burrerita de Ypacaraí (1962) and
others. The lack implicit in these situations has contributed to a (mostly frustrated) desire
to produce film that can claim independence from extranational funding, technology and
expertise. In a personal interview with Capibara (2008) director Pablo Meilicke, he
expressed the opinion that a film should not be considered Paraguayan unless every
individual involved, including every member of the crew, is Paraguayan. He was hesitant
to qualify Encina’s Hamaca Paraguaya as a Paraguayan film because the art director is
Argentine and the producers are European. This may seem like a hypernationalist
reservation, but considering the context, it potentially expresses a desire for a cinema that
is finally “free” from a historical dependence on external resources.
In my interview with Paz Encina she makes an interesting comment in relation to her
personal identity and its authenticity: “No soy ciudadana del mundo, yo soy del país a la
cual pertenezco. Soy paraguaya. No hablo inglés. Y puede que yo este perdiendo un
motón de cosas, pero que querés que te diga…” She says this with a strong Argentine
inflection, certainly acquired during her years at the Universidad del Cine in Buenos
Aires. Even more ironically, at the time of this writing, Encina is living and working in
Germany. I read this moment as a perfect metaphor for the authenticity/transnationality
double-bind of Paraguayan film: the desire to be purely Paraguayan/create purely
Paraguayan cultural products surges from the very impossibility of doing so.
130
In her chapter from Transnational Cinema, “Migrancy and the Latin American
Cinemascape” Anne Marie Stock makes the following comment: “Despite the
multicultural collaboration driving film-making in the region, critical discourse continues
to privilege cultural authenticity. Films recognizable as ‘Latin American’ are embraced;
those ‘tainted’ by extra-national elements and influences are dismissed” (157). I relate
this situation to the “brand” of “Latin Americaness” that the West exacts from “Third
Cinema,” which I discuss in Chapter 3. The condition of the current market for
Paraguayan film must also be recognized as a force shaping the cultural preoccupation
with authenticity, somewhat ironically equated with a rejection of cultural imperialism
(when it is in fact, the product of cultural imperialism.) In Encina’s statement she rejects
the English language in a move that suggests a privileging of a cultural authenticity
and/or a rejection of the cultural imperialism of the Hollywood, or writ even more
broadly, the English language. The irony in how she pronounces her comment, however,
apparently escapes her. This is not intended to be personal criticism directed toward
Encina, but rather, an opportunity to read how the palimpsest (power structure) on which
her work/cultural ideology is set bleeds through. As Dudley Andrew points out, in the
1980s “‘Authenticity,’ a seductive and dangerous term, . . . could scarcely be avoided by
critics looking beyond Hollywood for genuine difference . . .” (77). Unfortunately, the
obsession with authenticity did not die with that decade.
Paul Willemen explores the concept of how authenticity functions in “Third
Cinema” through a desire to not only differentiate from Hollywood, but, more broadly,
counteract colonial rule in general. He points out the limitations of this reaction, resulting,
131
in fact, in a mirror to imperialism’s practices, as I have discussed in Chapter 3’s
description of how Paraguayan film’s preoccupation with a specific type of national
identity is required for success in international film festivals and in the acquisition of
project funding:
The responses to this reciprocal but antagonistic formation of identities fall
into three types. . . . The second option is to develop the antagonistic sense of
national identity by seeking to reconnect with traditions that got lost or were
displaced or distorted by colonial rule or by the impact of Western industrialmilitary power. . . . The main [dangers in this] derive from the need to
reinvent traditions, to conjure up an image of pre-colonial innocence and
authenticity, since the national-cultural identity must be definition be founded
on what has been suppressed or distorted. The result is mostly a nostalgia for a
pre-colonial society which in fact never existed, full of idyllic villages and
communities people by “authentic” (read folkloric) innocents in touch with
the “real” values perverted by imperialism or, in the most naïve versions,
perverted by technology. Alternatively, particular aspects of some culture are
selected and elevated into essentialized symbols of the national identity: the
local answer to imperialism’s stereotypes. Mirroring imperialism’s practices,
such efforts mostly wind up presenting previously existing relations of
domination and subordination ass the “natural” state of things. (239-240)
What I would like to stress about Willemen’s critique is that from the point of
colonization forward, the “colonized” are unthinkable without the “colonizers.” Those
132
who “fall into the trap” of “naïve” thinking that Willemen describes are only part of the
equation. To use Fanon’s words, “Let us have the courage to say it outright: It is the
racist who creates his inferior” (93). There would be no mirroring of imperialism’s
practices without imperialism. Just as Fanon points out that “the Malagasy exists with
the European” (97), “Third Cinema” only exists with “First Cinema.”
Truly, Paraguayan “authenticity” is also unthinkable without the extranational. In
fact, Paraguayan film is, and has been, a necessarily transnational process in the
following ways:
1. Film referents necessarily come from outside of the country, being that Paraguay has
had very little film history while its neighbors; Brazil and Argentina for example, have a
lengthy film history that has received critical attention.
2. Historically, film in Paraguay has only been achieved through transnational coproductions. In fact, the first videographers in Paraguay were not Paraguayan, as
represented in Manuel Cuenca’s document on Paraguayan film.31
3. The technology required to develop 35mm film does not currently exist in Paraguay.
Buenos Aires is the closest place in which this technology can be accessed.
4. There is no established film school in Paraguay, so directors must travel abroad to
places such as Buenos Aires (Paz Encina, Pablo Lamar), the United States (Hugo
Gamarra, Hugo Cataldo, Sergio Marcos), Cuba (Ramiro Gómez), London (Marcelo
Martinessi), Russia (Galia Jiménez), etc.
31
See Chapter 1.
133
5. There is not a large enough of a market in Paraguay to fund or screen these film
projects in a lucrative way. Seed money must come from outside of the country.
Prestigious awards can only be secured at international film festivals.
Given these conditions, people in Paraguay interested in working in film
frequently have to confront the question of migration. As producer Aníbal Ríos states in a
personal interview, “La pregunta obligatoria es ‘¿No pensás viajar?’” referring to the lack
of options for formal training and employment in film in Paraguay. Director Pablo Lamar
also comments on the need for migration, his decision to live and work in Brazil and his
experience at film school in Buenos Aires:
Tanto en Argentina como en Paraguay… sería mucho encontrar un trabajo
pago o no casi. En Brasil está muy buena ahora la cantidad de inversión. El
presupuesto de la nación en cultura es muy grande. Cortometrajes tienen
realmente un presupuesto bastante alto. Generan una industria mismo. Hay
posibilidades de trabajo real. . . . La cuestión económica siempre es una
cuestión que genera más migración en el país. . . . No se me hace fácil
imaginarme viviendo acá y haciendo lo que me gusta a todo rato, vivir del
cine. Ya me jugué al estudiar eso, hice cinco años de mi vida en Buenos Aires.
Ahora quiero continuar por ahí y no volver a otra cosa. . . . La formación es
importante y de repente la práctica no da una reflexión de formación en
Paraguay.
Rios’ and Lamar’s comments reflect a sort of glass ceiling for audiovisual producers in
Paraguay. People can access some level of training and experience nationally, but must
134
migrate eventually if they want to expand their possibilities. This can be a limiting and
frustrating condition of film making for some.
The aforementioned comments bring up questions such as: how much of the labor
and design has to be Paraguayan for a film to qualify as a Paraguayan cultural product?
Who is a Paraguayan, anyway? Someone who lives half of the year in Europe, the United
States or Buenos Aires? Someone who is a full time resident of another country? What do
we make of the fact that most Paraguayan directors have been trained abroad, in places
like Argentina, the U.S. and Cuba? These questions can help us to identify a local/foreign
binary and try to think both sides of the binary simultaneously in an effort to disrupt the
logic on which the dominant Creole narrative of national identity was constructed. What
Paraguayan film leaves us should not be uncritically read as a faithful representation of
national cultural authenticity. Rather, in the words of Anne Marie Stock:
…it seems that what remains when film-makers and films constantly cross
borders is, in fact, a critical nostalgia for cultural authenticity . . . Today this
nostalgia prevails among critics who privilege “pure” national films and
cinemas . . . while effectively marginalizing those films, film-makers and
spectators bisecting geopolitical boundaries. Critical discourse remains fixed
within national and regional paradigms, while globalization increasingly impacts
that body of work known as Latin American Cinema. (158, italics mine)
Stocks’ statement reminds us that it is not only filmmakers and their funders who
misguidedly exalt the concept of cultural authenticity, but critics and theorists as well.
135
One of the dangers of criticism reliant on “authenticity” has to do with
authenticity’s connection to the essentialist view of the nation as homogeneous,
uncontested space/origin. Valentina Vitali and Paul Willemen describe this link in the
following way:
The most common way of forestalling questions about the ways in which
economic arrangements shape cultural issues and modes of thinking, while
appearing to solve the problem of that interaction, has been to invoke the
metaphor of the national body and its organic formation in a myth-like ‘natural’
past. (2)
Following Vitali and Willemen, a fetishization of the national body and its origins should
be a red flag, directing analysis toward the market; the very space that is being obscured.
Economic arrangements in fact bleed through onto cultural products, perhaps in spite of
whatever intentions were involved in the direct and indirect authorship of the product.
This presents a special opportunity for the theorist—not to learn about authenticity, but to
learn about the effects of the market. Frankfurt represents a unique metaphor with which
to explore the interwoven discursive threads of nationalist fervor (nacionalismo
futbolero), religiosity, Paraguay’s location in the global neoliberal world market and the
division of Paraguayan classes.
In all the aforementioned filmic attempts to focus on the nation, the primary
product is further evidence that so-called national spaces are, upon closer inspection,
more accurately described as transnational spaces. This is also why I have included a
close reading of Frankfurt here. Frankfurt is a documentary that forces one to ask, for
136
example, how it creates meaning about paraguayidad through European protagonists?
How is Frankfurt a story about borders? Is the presence of technology (mainly, the
television) in Frankfurt to be read as a culturally “corruptive” force, or is it present in
order to spur a questioning of dominant concepts of “authenticity”?
Frankfurt
Ramiro Gómez has a similar profile to many Paraguayan filmmakers: he was born
in the late seventies and did most of his filmic training abroad. Gómez attended the
Instituto Superior de Arte de la Habana, Cuba from 1996 to 2001. He also did
coursework in video journalism in Quito, Ecuador and in São Paulo, Brazil. As is
common for audiovisual producers in Paraguay, he got his start in the business creating
material for publicity purposes. In 2007, Tierra Roja (2006)—his first documentary—
won awards at several international film festivals. Due to a lack of funding, Gómez’s
second documentary, Frankfurt (2008), did not circulate as much in comparison, however,
it did appear at a few major film festivals, but did not win any awards. Gómez cites
Glauber Rocha as an influence.
When I interviewed Gómez he described his method for shooting both Tierra
Roja and Frankfurt. He described going to live with several rural families (in the case of
Frankfurt, these families were specifically located in Borja and Isla Alta.) He made a
point of not using any material from the first three days of his stay in order to give the
residents time to get used to his presence and the presence of the camera. His
documentaries do not include any voice-over commentary. Gómez states that his goal is
137
to simply shoot what he sees. (Of course, even the most minimal amount of intervention
involves framing, emplotment and embeds a way of seeing.) This approach echoes García
Espinosa’s prescription of showing the process of a problem without providing
commentary as a way “to submit [the problem] to judgment without pronouncing the
verdict” (81). As with Encina, both directors seem influenced by foundational manifestos
for Third Cinema.
Frankfurt opens with a shot from a dirt floor: a bare foot wearing a flip-flop. This
foot belongs to a young man wearing an athletic track suit and fanning a fire. The sound
of a chicken clucking is audible. The youth whistles a polka. There is a cat and a dog
curled up next to the fire. An older man is nearby; presumably, the younger’s father.
The young man takes the water that has been heating on the fire to make his mate
cocido for breakfast. He drinks mate with coquito.32 The yerba packaging displays the
colors of the Paraguayan flag (Yerba Mate Pajarito). The young man has breakfast alone.
The sound of a radio or television is audible in the background. Commentators are
preparing the audience for a World Cup game: England vs. Paraguay. We can only make
out a part of what one of them says, presumably about Paraguay: “Este es un país que ha
sufrido mucho por la guerra…”
The next scene shows the television: soccer fans (hinchas) are wearing national
colors. The television is set against a wall decorated with images from religious
iconography. An older woman, presumably the youth’s mother, hangs the Paraguayan
32
Coquito is a type of bread that hardens and dries out in the same manner as a soft pretzel. This allows
people to buy it in bulk at low prices and consume it long after regular bread would have gone stale. It is
typically eaten with a hot beverage in which it can be dunked and softened. It is noteworthy that this
youth’s breakfast does not include any type of protein.
138
flag. An image of a light-skinned God holding the baby Jesus is framed in juxtaposition
with the flag. We see another shot of the World Cup game being played in Frankfurt: a
large group of Paraguayan fans are visible in the stadium.
The television then broadcasts from Asunción. A newscaster interviews a BBC
correspondent, greeting him in English: “Good morning, you are stupid!” The
correspondent ignores the comment and gracefully states “I’m in the very best country in
South America.” An hincha named Tania puts a Paraguayan hat on the BBC
correspondent’s head.
The camera goes back to the young man’s bare foot in the foreground, catholic
religious iconography in the background. The viewer also sees the man’s father smoking
a rustic cigar. In off we hear a commercial being broadcast on the television: “Hay gente
que sufre. Hay gente que espera, que brinca, que canta, que alienta, que mira, que sufre;
hay gente contenta, que pide, que cree, que suspira. Hay gente fanática . . . la pasión se
lleva en el corazón y se celebra. Pilsen, sponsor oficial de la auténtica pasión albirroja.”
While we hear this audio, the camera provides a close up of each of the icons on the wall,
particularly Jesus and the Virgin Mary. The youth’s face is somber. His father continues
to smoke silently. In yet another commercial we hear children chant: “Paraguay!
Paraguay! Paraguay!” and then, an announcer who states: “La pasión por el fútbol y la
fuerza de nuestros colores está en cada rincón del Paraguay.”
The son, mother and father rise for the national anthem. The Paraguayan fans in
the stadium in Germany are all light skinned, which is in direct contrast with this family’s
darker skin. All clap after the anthem: the family in Paraguay, the players on the field,
139
and the fans in the stands. The commentator is heard saying “El público paraguayo;
espectacular.”
In the next shot there is no audio, just a view of the field as the game starts rolling.
The World Cup camera pauses on some of the most famous players, particularly Roque
Santa Cruz and Justo Villar. The chanting and singing of the Paraguayan fans is audible.
Within minutes of the game, David Beckham is allowed a penalty kick for a foul. Carlos
Gamarra tries to block the ball, but it makes its way into his own team’s goal instead.
Unwittingly, he helps England score a point. The family at home is shocked and
comment “¡Que bárbaro, fue en contra!” “Aquello que tanto habíamos planificado se
rompe apenas en el minuto tres,” the commentator remarks as the son and father look on
somberly. The screen fades to black.
The next scene introduces another family; presumably three brothers getting up
and getting ready for their day. One is playing a game on a Nokia mobile phone. The
light is coming in through the spaces between the slats that make up the walls of the
structure they have been sleeping in. The sound of geese honking loudly nearby is
audible. The brothers are arguing jokingly about who stole who’s pack of gum. We see a
mirror on an armoire. There is light coming through the roof, also. The youths are slender
and muscular; we can observe this as they dress and undress. The sound of baby chicks
and the hum of a power generator are audible. The camera focuses on a light bulb which
has lit up.
After a brief scene involving a country-side soccer match, (obviously a scheduled
game as they are wearing uniforms) the camera returns to the brother’s shack: the shot
140
focuses on a blank television screen; it is apparently broken. The three young men listen
to the game while they work on something from the bed. The chickens are in the structure
with them, clucking loudly; one even hops up on the bed for a second. No one seems to
notice. They are trying to solve math problems. There are clothes drying out, hung
indoors above their heads. The television is still blank but we can hear the commentator
announcing a goal scored by the Czech Republic.33
Next we see a woman shot from the behind in a shack. Another woman also
enters the home and is combing her hair. The television is broadcasting the game. Even
though it offers only a blank, glowing screen, everyone crowds around it. It is framed like
another member of the family.
Back at the other home there is a Ronaldinho commercial on the television
followed by a lottery ticket commercial: “Seneté—millionarios de verdad. ¡Che
poremoi!”34 The commercial promises a chance at winning money and a truck. The film
cuts away to the young man looking in the mirror.
The next scene returns to the three brothers riding all together on a small
motorcycle down a bumpy, red dirt road. They are following a 1970s Mercedes bus of the
type that are still in regular use in Paraguay. A group of men get off and pay their dues.
They then change into their uniforms and warm up for the soccer match they are here for.
33
It is interesting to note that in World Cup games, linguistically, a nation’s team becomes a stand-in for
the nation itself. For example, announcers state that “the Czech Republic scored a goal.” In this sense, the
confrontation on the soccer field is even more like a confrontation of nations, an event that necessarily
connotes war. This link becomes even more literalized at the time of La Guerra del Fútbol between
Honduras and Ecuador that broke out after a World Cup game in 1969. Political tensions produced by
economic disparity between the two nations had been mounting well before their World Cup confrontations,
but the games definitively provided opportunities for those tensions to be expressed with increasing
violence, which eventually boiled over and lead to the breaking of diplomatic relations between the two
nations followed by a four day war.
34
This Guaraní phrase translates to “Me pica la mano,” a sign of good luck.
141
The referee urinates in the woods. (There is nowhere else to urinate.) For some privacy,
he stands behind a cab displaying a sign: “Villarica.” This gives the audience further
information about the possible location. As the game starts there is a considerable amount
of wind in the audio. There is a brief shot of a bull on the sidelines of the soccer field; he
turns his head to look rather comically, directly at the camera. At half time the players
break and talk about strategy; the coach lectures them about better communication very
animatedly and seriously. There is a shot of a light-skinned man shaking the coach’s hand
and asking in English, “Are you the new coach here?” He laughs and the coach looks
uncomfortably at the camera; obviously he does not speak English. There are a few more
shots of the game, then a fade to black.
The film resumes at night. In a framing similar to previous framings, a young
woman’s head is situated in one corner of the shot and a Coca-Cola sign is prominent on
the wall behind her. Another woman, perhaps her mother, is washing dishes. A polka
plays on the radio. The older woman heats water on a stove top. The men sit around a
table playing cards. Shakira’s “Hips Don’t Lie” comes on the radio.
After a fade to black we see two girls getting ready for their day, back at the home
with the broken television. The sound of chicks peeping is loud again. The television is
on, of course. One of the brothers tries to fix it to get an image again, but nothing seems
to work. There is a rather long shot of the brothers trying different channels with no
improvement. The screen is blank; it produces not much more than a bluish light. A
woman looks on as one of the young men tries to solve the television issue. The spectator
may feel some of this family’s frustration as the spectator is forced to watch the blank
142
screen for an extended period of time as well, as the shot goes on. The family finally
gives up and just listens to the game. The television screen is the last thing we see as the
shot fades to black.
The next scene begins with another family’s television. They enjoy a better (but
still fuzzy) image of the Sweden-Paraguay game in action broadcast on SNT. This shot is
set in a different house, yet the television sits against yet another wall decorated with a
collection of religious iconography. There are women and girls in the scene, preparing ice,
cutting up a pig head—not watching the game with the men. The camera lingers as a
young woman saws away at a pig head. A light-skinned child Jesus, depicted as a
shepherd (with a lamb in his lap) is framed against the television. The camera then
focuses once again on the pig head being prepared and fades to black.
When the documentary resumes, we see the same television, then another woman
from behind; her back is to the television as she clips her nails. The young girl puts the
ice in the freezer next to the television, which is also next to the bed. The men drink
tereré and swear at the game because it is not going well. Another woman is clipping her
nails as she watches the game. The men’s faces turn more somber and the audio turns
silent as the camera zooms in on their unsmiling, unflinching faces. There is a toddler on
the bed. A man gets up, swears in Guaraní and walks away to smoke a cigarette. They
watch with bated breath as Paraguay loses the game.
The penultimate scene is set a little before dawn. It is still very dark and a fog lies
over the landscape. The moon is still bright in the sky. The fire is started for warming the
mate, and we see the elderly man from the first scene of the documentary drinking out of
143
a guampa inscribed with the words “República del Paraguay” and decorated with an
etching of a Paraguayan flag. The man packs two machetes and heads to the road. As it
gets lighter he walks down the red dirt road. The camera zooms in on his flip flops and
bare feet; he is wearing a warm jacket; it seems cold out. He is smoking a cigar again.
The length of the scene suggests he walks quite a ways. The camera pans into the grey
sky.
In the last scene the man cuts cane while smoking. His son and another farmer,
also cutting cane some meters away, talk about a local soccer game as they work. They
are rather dexterous with their machetes, making short work of the cane. The camera
changes angel and we see the third man cutting cane, and one horse grazing. The horse
eats the leaves off the cut stalks of cane.
Historical Border Wars and Contemporary Global Neoliberal Capitalism
As described in the first chapter, Paraguay’s historical border wars play an active
role in the contemporary constitution of national identity in Paraguay; specifically, the
Triple Alliance War (with Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay) and the Chaco War (with
Bolivia). For a relatively small filmic archive, this is evident in the preoccupation with
these historic border wars and with current border issues: the film Cerro Corá (1978) is a
fascist re-writing of the Triple Alliance War produced by the Stroessner regime; Hamaca
Paraguaya brings historical revisionism to the Chaco War by erasing the glory of this
win and replacing it with the loss felt by the couple who gave their son for the war; Los
144
Paraguayos (2006)—a documentary by Marcelo Martinelli, commissioned by the
Brazilian oil company, Petrobras—re-visits the contested “heroism” of the Triple
Alliance War icon, President Francisco Antonio López. Soberanía Violada (2007),
directed by Mariana Vazquez, equates current-day Brazilian soy agroindustry’s methods
in Paraguay with an attack on Paraguay’s borders and sovereignty. What is the meaning
of historical border wars as a referent for present day audiovisual production in Paraguay?
Like the aforementioned films, Frankfurt also translates these historical border
wars into a current-day neoliberal world order echoing colonial relationships and loss
through transnational processes and cultural iconography. Take for example one of the
major moments of loss in the documentary: England beats Paraguay. England’s role in
Frankfurt must be read against its perceived historical involvement in the Triple Alliance
War. At the time of the war, Britain was aggressively building infrastructure, largely in
the form of railroads, in neighboring Argentina. Britain was able to justify this
investment given Argentina’s lack of capital and labor and the fact that Britain was their
main consumer of meat and grain (Skidmore and Smith, 71-72). The investment allowed
Britain to monopolize Argentina’s infrastructure for commerce, benefitting the empire
while solidifying relations between the two nations even further. In Paraguay, President
Carlos Antonio López also wanted to build a railroad, but did not want to have the same
sort of dependence/entrenchment with the British Empire, and therefore negotiated a
business arrangement in which the government would pay cash for British engineering.
This much of the history has been documented. It becomes more difficult to prove what is
popularly believed: that Britain was irritated by Paraguay’s unwillingness to enter into
145
the same relationship of dependence as it had forged with Argentina, and therefore saw
Paraguay as a resistant state that could be subjugated into economic compromise more
easily after the Triple Alliance War. Thus, in the Paraguayan national imaginary, Britain
supported the gang of three’s attack on Paraguay. There is some historical scholarship
available that would refute this claim, demonstrating that Britain was in opposition to the
war because all war was generally bad for international commerce.35 However, it is a fact
that Sir Edward Thornton, the British Minister to the Argentine Republic, demonstrated
his support of the Triple Alliance with his presence at the signing of a Treaty of Alliance
between Brazil and Argentina.
The Triple Alliance War story haunts Frankfurt as this documentary (re)presents
the story of a small, impoverished nation where people survive in extreme poverty while
in other (urban and European) spaces, wealth and modernity are booming. Frankfurt
illustrates the incredible scale of this national and transnational inequity in a way that
harkens back to the inequity of three nations ganging up on one. Frankfurt holds up a
mirror—a repeated visual element in the documentary—and asks Paraguayans to look at
their condition: are we in the same spot as we were after the Triple Alliance War? Have
we substituted colonialism and empire for the neoliberal world order?
Paraguay’s contemporary relationships with its neighbors are still tenuous. Many
feel that the government has “sold out” to Brazil, particularly in the soy business.
Soberanía Violada describes specifically how many rural farmers on the Paraguay-Brazil
border have sold their lands to Brazilian investors for low values because they were
35
See Salles, Ricardo (2003). Guerra do Paraguai: Memórias & Imagens. Rio de Janeiro: Bibilioteca
Nacional.
146
dazzled by the sight of mounds of cash, out of touch with the fact that $10,000 USD does
not go as far in the capital city as they thought. Once the money and the land are gone,
many of these farmers become destitute homeless people roaming the capital, surviving
through recycling and begging. While soy is touted as the export that has made
Paraguay’s macro-economy one of the fastest-growing in the region, the percentage of
Paraguayans living below the poverty line has climbed to 19.3%.36 This contradiction
between the macro and micro economies of Paraguay draws attention to the quiet, probusiness permissiveness of the State and the upward redistribution of resources that Lisa
Duggan describes as defining characteristics of neoliberalism as it developed in the
United States and later, Europe. A way in which this neoliberal moment in Paraguay
differs from the way in which neoliberalism is structured to function in the United States,
for example, has to do with the fact that in the case of the soy industry, resources are not
just redistributed upward, but outward as much of the profits exit the country via the
Brazilian investors who actually own the land. Under these conditions, nationalism can
be a place from which to express popular resistance (“Stop selling us out to Brazil!”) and
it can be an ideology to which neoliberalism can align itself with profitable results,
depending on the mechanization.
While multiple theorists have discussed the weakening of the nation state under
the conditions of postmodernity, some, such as Gareth Williams in The Other Side of the
Popular, observe that neoliberalism still requires the nation state in order to function.
Neoliberalism exposes the limits of the nation state and at once requires the nation state.
36
http://ea.com.py/avance-sojero-y-pobreza/
147
The shell that national structures vacate in the postnational turn is the system that
neoliberalism appropriates in order to draw ever more participants into the market. If we
follow Williams, to speak of the nation today is always an encoded way to speak of the
market.
Idelber Avelar explains the rise of the allegorical in Latin American cultural
production as a sign of the transition from State to Market:
If the arrival of the dictatorships and the ensuing transition from State to Market
are coextensive with the end of the boom…then the emergence of these
allegorical machines is also coextensive with the decadence of magical-realist or
fantastic poetics in Latin America. If the latter had made of the symbol the
principle of unification whereby the dispersion of events could be recollected and
raised to a higher master code . . . the end of the possibility of a nationally
sustained capitalism and the passage to the planetary horizon of the Market
coincide with the primacy of the allegorical. (75)
In this sense, I read Frankfurt as part of a trend in Latin American cultural production:
the World Cup season becomes an allegory for Paraguay’s national reality and the class
reality within Paraguay under global neoliberal capitalism. While some Paraguayans
cannot even afford closed-toe shoes to wear in winter, other, lighter-skinned Paraguayans
have enough money to spend on holiday in Germany and attend a World Cup game; an
upward (re)distribution of resources seems evident.
148
The Market, the State and the Church
Frankfurt allegorically links the market, nationalism (particularly nacionalismo
futbolero), and religiosity through visual/auditory triangulation. Take for example two
instances in which yerba mate is included in the shot. Toward the beginning of the film
we see a young man having breakfast: he is drinking Yerba Mate Pajarito in packaging
that prominently displays the colors of the Paraguayan flag while a television
broadcasting chatter relevant to the World Cup is audible. Toward the end of the film the
young man’s father is featured drinking mate from a guampa also painted with the colors
of the flag, sporting the etching “República del Paraguay.” These son/father moments of
yerba mate consumption nearly bookend the documentary. (Yerba mate has been an
important cash crop in Paraguay since colonial times.) The connection between the desire
to sell a product and nationalism leads one to ask: what is nationalism asking us to buy
into? A market reality? A class position?
In other instances the television broadcasts commercials that make obvious
appeals to nacionalismo futbolero in order to sell beer. For example, in one scene the
audio states: “Hay gente que sufre. Hay gente que espera, que brinca, que canta, que
alienta, que mira, que sufre; hay gente contenta, que pide, que cree, que suspira. Hay
gente fanática . . . la pasión se lleva en el corazón y se celebra. Pilsen, sponsor oficial de
la auténtica pasión albirroja.” The film further links this audio with a visual component:
the bare foot in the foreground and the religious iconography in the background. At this
point, as in others, an audiovisual relationship between the television, the flag, the
149
religious iconography decorating the wall and the family is produced. The camera lingers
on the frames of television and Niño Jesús, for example, creating a moment for reflection.
This audiovisual layering creates a relationship between marketing, religion, nationalism,
fútbol and poverty. Marketing for products becomes relatable to marketing for the nation.
The fanaticism of fútbol fandom becomes relatable to the religious experience as an
“opiate for the masses.” When the rural poor buy the products being sold, (particularly in
the case of beer), is the end result less money for them and more money for already
wealthy impresarios? When the rural poor buy the nationalism being sold via fútbol, are
they buying into “the failure of the nation to come into its own,” i.e. a nationalism in
service of neoliberalism that only adds to the uneven distribution of wealth in Paraguay?
How does fútbol fandom and religious ideology seduce the rural poor into acting against
their own best interests?
Idelber Avelar recounts Jose Joaquin Brunner’s article, “Notes on Modernity and
Postmodernity in Latin American Culture” to highlight his reading of the relationship
between Market, State and Church:
Brunner shows how authoritarianism performed the function of “maintaining the
order adequate to the new model of capitalist development,” thus being organic to
the implementation of market values in Chile. Market ideology, military doctrine,
and religious traditionalism—the three components of the “authoritarian
conception of the world”—are demonstrated to form a coherent, unified ideology.
(55)
150
Paraguay, like Chile, has had years of experience with military dictatorship, its
authoritarianism and its forms of indoctrination (religion, propaganda, torture, kidnapping,
etc.)
Frankfurt seems to illustrate how certain aspects of this ideological trifecta are still in
circulation, but at the service of neoliberal capitalism. Avelar goes on to link religious
discourse and patriarchal authoritarianism in the following way:
As the comforting language of Christianity fitfully complimented the heroic and
militaristic rhetoric of “the armed vanguard,” the dictatorship achieved a
fundamental victory, for the language in which its atrocities were narrated was, in
its essence, the very same language that it cultivated and promoted: macho
militarism seasoned with pious Catholicism. (67)
Militarism may be absent from Frankfurt in a literal sense, but in a metaphorical sense it
is definitely present. As I previously mentioned in a footnote, the World Cup connotes a
confrontation of nations that is easily comparable to a type of warfare; the soccer field
becomes a battle field—especially given popular belief about Britain’s role in the Triple
Alliance War. The gendered environment, on the soccer field as in the home, is
visibilized in Frankfurt given how women are mostly absent from the documentary.
When they are present, they are not featured in starring roles but in supporting ones.
While men play the game and men watch the game, women are mostly shown doing
household chores such as preparing food and washing dishes. The only way a woman can
“get on television” it seems, is to put her body on display as a sexy hincha; a position of
more visibility, but still a supporting role. It important to note how the uneven
151
distribution of wealth across classes runs parallel with severe gender inequity in this
equation.
Returning to the language of the Pilsen beer commercial, one may find that before
hearing the last line, the audio could easily be mistaken for a description of catholic
devotees instead of soccer fans. Suffering plays such an important role that it is
mentioned twice: (“Hay gente que sufre . . . ”).The language could be describing people
who have made a pilgrimage to pay for a promesa, as is customary during the annual
peregrinata para la Virgen de Caacupe: “Hay gente que espera…que pide” (who ask for
miracles and wait for their prayers to be answered), que canta, (who sing hymns), “que
alienta,” (who support each other in their faith,) “que mira,” (who strengthen their faith
by gazing at icons), que cree, (who believe) and finally, “hay gente contenta;” (people
who are made happy by their faith). Interestingly enough, the word chosen to celebrate
this faith is the word “fanaticism:” “Hay gente fanática.” Notice also that authenticity and
its empty promises are not left out of the equation: “Pilsen, sponsor oficial de la auténtica
pasión albirroja.”
Avelar’s reading of the functionality of Catholicism within the context of a
military dictatorship, specifically in terms of Christ’s story, is particularly important for
analyzing Latin American penchants for mano dura regimes:
What separates the sacrificial scapegoat from the victorious hero is, in a sense, the
secret itself….Christ holds the secret of his divinity by refusing the temptation of
performing the public miracle that would prove it. The defeated thus reveal
themselves victorious by holding a secret that contains the key to their
152
defeat….Could this not be taken to be the meaning of the Christian axiom that
Jesus came down to earth in order to be crucified? (157)
Suffering, sacrifice, crucifixion and martyrdom are the priorities of this brand of
Catholicism. Avelar stresses this asking “How do we explain the paradox of a God who
conquers and emerges victorious precisely by surrendering Himself to crucifixion by His
own followers? . . . what is the process through which the reactive ideology of suffering
martyrs becomes the backbone of national imaginaries and identities?” (136). Suffering,
sacrifice, crucifixion and martyrdom are precisely the elements that make the Triple
Alliance War story so haunting: 60-70% of the population, the president and his son,
territory and financial independence were all sacrificed. Paraguayan industry was
destroyed and the nation went into extreme debt with Britain (one million pounds) after
having been so proudly debt-free and isolationist for so long. Although the president
sacrificed on the battle field (Francisco Solano López) has been elevated—especially by
dictatorship historicism—to the level of a martyr, more recent scholarship revises history
to depict him as the man who in fact sacrificed Paraguay by leading it into the Triple
Alliance War. Any way you slice it, Paraguay is left having to make sense of its loss, and
using either or both versions of history to explain its current subaltern position and the
subaltern position of its working class. Continuing loss and a focus on loss is perhaps a
way of not coming to terms with defeat, but, as Avelar explains, a way of elevating defeat
to the level of divinity. It is not ironic that the Paraguayan working class should be
crucified to by their own countrymen in the upper classes, just as it is not ironic that Jesus
was crucified by his own followers. Not only is loss, lack, sacrifice and suffering integral
153
to Frankfurt, it is a major component of so many other Paraguayan films as well. In
Hamaca Paraguaya, for example, the couple who have nearly nothing sacrifice their only
son for the nation in the Chaco War.
One of the recurrent narratives that Paraguayans tell about themselves has to do
with a belief that they are a submissive people. A history of infamous uncontested mano
dura dictatorships such as those of Rodriguez de Francia and Alfredo Stroessner are cited
as the evidence. A people’s revolution has never taken place: the coup’d’tat that
overthrew Stroessner was not a people’s revolution. Andrés Rodriguez, at the head, was
Stroessner’s right hand man. He saw an opportunity to come into even more power with
the backing of the U.S. government when it became their priority to end South American
dictatorships. Today the “Éramos felices y no lo sabíamos” narrative is alive and well.
Many working class people remember the dictatorship nostalgically. In a similar vein,
when discussing the dismal state of Paraguay’s microeconomy vs. its macroeconomy, I
asked Sonia Brucke of the Cámara de Género if people would ever rise up given the level
of poverty in Paraguay. She likewise responded that there would be no revolution, ever:
“El paraguayo es sumiso” she stated in a factual manner. In an interview with director
Pablo Lamar he compared Paraguayans to Argentines to illustrate their lack of civic
tradition: “En Paraguay nunca existieron las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo. Cuando ocurrió
el fuego de Ycua Bolaños la gente ni hizo la mitad del escándalo que se hizo en
Argentina con el fuego X, y murieron menos personas.”37 This submissive and
37
Lamar could not recall the details of the Argentine fire he was using as a comparison. The 2004 Ycua
Bolaños fire in Paraguay was remarkable because the people had never faced an accidental disaster of such
magnitude; that had taken so many lives. The fire occurred on a Sunday, while many people were having
their Sunday lunch in the company of their families in the food court of the Ycua Bolaños supermarket.
154
downtrodden attitude is not just chalked up to a weakness, but rather, is described as a
passionate desire to follow. If the leader happens to not have the nation’s best interest in
mind or is willing to sell out the country’s resources to the highest foreign bidder, that is
not the people’s fault. The soldier does as he is ordered. The people make due with what
they are offered.
Here my reading of religiosity has to do with its circulation as a specific discourse
activated politically in the service of the market. It is important to recall, however, that
well before this neoliberal moment there have been historical periods in Latin America
when religious and cultural practices have been widely theorized as reflections of racial
inferiority. As Jesús Martín-Barbero discusses in his book, From Media to Mediations:
Modernization and Mass Mediation in Latin America, from the 20s to the 40s particularly,
social analysis in Latin America was split into two camps: a populist nationalism that
searches for lost national identity in the rural space, particularly among indígena culture,
and a progressive rationalism that sees the “indolent and superstitious nature of the
populace [as] the fundamental obstacle to development” (189). During one of my
research trips to Paraguay a dear friend of the privileged class and I were talking about
the severe cold front that had moved in. I had read in the paper that morning that multiple
rural people had died of exposure. When I told her this, she unflinchingly wrote it off as
Darwinism. This type of progressive rationalism is perfectly congruent with
When the fire broke out, security personnel were instructed to close and lock doors to avoid losses from
looting. The fire spread more quickly than anyone expected after sparking explosions, taking the lives of
entire families, 394 individuals at final count. There were no fire exits nor were there fire security systems
installed. The store owners were initially given a light sentence in court (five years in prison), which
caused protesters to erupt in a violent demonstration that eventually put enough public pressure on the
judicial system to cause the court to re-assess the sentence.
155
neoliberalism’s emphasis on freeing the sectors in power from accountability for the
social contract; in other words, there is no sense of responsibility for a social safety net.
The “haves” feel no calling to provide functioning programs for the “have nots.” It is the
“have-nots’” own fault that they have not. The linkage here between discourses on
religion, race, class and neoliberal logic would not be lost on Duggan, who specifically
stresses that “Neoliberalism was constructed in and through cultural and identity politics
and cannot be undone by a movement without consistencies and analyses that respond
directly to that fact” (3).
In a similar vein is the argument that if the Paraguayan working class does not
mount its own revolution, then they have only themselves to blame for their conditions.
This argument also leaves out the conception that Fanon is so adept at inserting into
arguments of racial inferiority:
When they are told we must act, they imagine bombs being dropped, armored cars
rumbling through the streets, a hail of bullets, the police—and they stay put. They
are losers from the start. Their incapacity to triumph by violence needs no
demonstration; they prove it in their daily life and maneuvering. (25, The
Wretched of the Earth)
Bloodshed is not required for the working class to understand who holds the power in
their nation; every day is a reminder of who is winning. This problem with this
conception, however, involves the fact that it is a viewpoint of loss, and by extension,
perpetual loss. Who does that melancholic turn serve? Does it not hermetically seal the
status quo? As I discussed in Chapter 3, Freud’s definition of melancholia has to do with
156
a pathological type of mourning, “interminable in nature…[denoting] a condition of
endless self-impoverishment” (Cheng, 7).
Melancholia and Politics
Avelar writes of defeat in the same way that Cheng describes melancholic loss:
“Martyrdom has been the most successful imaginary compensation for the incapacity or
unwillingness to come to terms with defeat . . . ” (155). Is religious discourse focused on
suffering, self-sacrifice and martyrdom melancholic? Cheng states that “The melancholic
must deny a loss in order to sustain the fiction of possession” (9). If we read Avelar and
Cheng together, it seems the attachment to defeat/martyrdom comes from the belief that
choosing defeat is in fact the secret of divinity: “Christ holds the secret of his divinity by
refusing the temptation of performing the public miracle that would prove it….Could this
not be taken to be the meaning of the Christian axiom that Jesus came down to earth in
order to be crucified?” (Avelar, 157). How then, is Frankfurt (re)presenting the
relationships between loss, defeat, poverty and religious discourse? When Paraguay
losses their last World Cup game, are the spectators supposed to share the same
nationalistic grief, or grieve over something larger: the failure of the nation-state to come
into its own, the failure of nationalism, the failure of populism in Latin America, the
hollow promises of these very discourses?
Frankfurt submits to judgment without pronouncing a verdict. How are we to
categorize it then? To borrow words from Canclini, does it “[represent] the national
157
destiny, traced from the beginnings of time” (110) or is it a way to shake the viewer into
action? Does melancholia enable politics or make political action impossible? Is
Frankfurt further evidence of Paraguay’s incomplete mourning? If so, does incomplete
mourning sustain the incompleteness of a political project (i.e. revolution) or is the
insistence on loss in filmic production in Paraguay more accurately described as a plea to
move from melancholia to a mourning that can end? ? Pablo Lamar states the following
on the topic: “El paraguayo carga con el mito de la guerra de la Triple Alianza, que fue
un genocidio, y con la dictadura que queda como un fantasma gigante. Yo creo que lo
que necesita la cultura paraguaya es que se hable de esos temas para despojarnos de ellos
y para ir adelante…” (personal interview).
At the time of this writing, 23 years after the fall of the Stroessner dictatorship, it
is rather remarkable that there has not been more audiovisual production dedicated to
dealing with the this dictatorship, its legacy, or politics in general in an overt manner (not
an allegorical manner). Cuchillo de Palo (2010) and Viento Sur (2011) are the only
exceptions. Cuchillo de Palo is a “creative documentary” directed by Renate Costa. In it
she interviews people about her late gay uncle and uses the discussion as an opportunity
to recount the dictatorship’s overt attack on homosexuals exemplified by the “List of
108” “known” homosexuals living in Paraguay during the dictatorship.38 Viento Sur, a
very abstract short directed by Paz Encina, features the voices of two men who are being
persecuted by the dictatorship and are considering either running from home or staying
38
In an expanded version of this work I will dedicate another chapter to “The queering of Paraguayan film”
that takes place with two films in particular: the creative documentary Cuchillo de Palo and the narrative
film, Semana Capital. Both films queer the archive in that they differ from the trend of featuring the rural
space (they both focus on the urban space) and are also the only Paraguayan films to feature queer lives.
158
and possibly facing torture. In light of this situation, Avelar’s comment on the boom is
relevant: “…the boom…responded with an aestheticization of politics, or, more to the
point, a substitution of aesthetics for politics” (29). Can the primacy of the allegorical in
audiovisual production in Paraguay be read as an erasure of the overtly political? Is it
comparable to what Avelar identifies as the boom’s substitution of aesthetics for politics?
And if it is, then would our conclusion be that the melancholic focus on loss in the filmic
production of Paraguay is an obstacle to change instead of a call to revolution?
In a sense, one could argue that the same social structures of control also offer
protection. The fear of offending someone can protect that person from serious criticism.
This plays an especially pertinent role when it comes to reviews of Paraguayan films. As
director Gómez puts it, “Este es el país de los incombustibles” (personal interview). If
someone has enough money and/or political power, few will dare to criticize them, no
matter how worthy of criticism their work may be. In fact, Gómez has published an OpEd in a national newspaper on the topic of “softness” in Paraguayan film criticism
(“Paraguay y su Cine Z”).
Affect and Structures of Feeling
Another important component of Frankfurt is the emotional realm, the realm of
affect. As the Pilsen commercial illustrates, nacionalismo futbolero is largely based on
emotion: “gente que sufre…que alienta…la pasión se lleva en el corazón…” The faces of
the spectators reveal emotion as they watch the game: at times they look on the verge of
159
tears, at times they swear in anger. What does the affective power of nacionalismo
futbolero do?
One could argue that part of the emotional investment in Frankfurt comes from
recognition of one’s own group, on multiple levels. Frankfurt includes scenes of rural
Paraguayans watching urban Paraguayans watching the game: the shared enthusiasm
across class and space is visible. Emotion cuts across geography and capitalism to
rhetorically join disparate groups under the umbrella of nacionalismo futbolero: a rural
person can see him/herself as a fan of the Paraguayan team, and recognize other fans in
the stadium: there is delight to be found in recognition and visibility, especially for a
nation that has been historically isolated and invisible on international screens. Rural
Paraguayans can also see themselves in the players as well, being that they, too, are
fútbol players. Frankfurt makes this understood by including the shots of the rural soccer
matches as well. Additionally, many of the national team’s players come from poor rural
communities.
On another level, rural spectators who might watch Frankfurt could also feel
hailed to recognize themselves on screen in a highly emotional and perhaps validating
moment of representation. Not only are they themselves represented; the national,
religious and fútbol iconography—all symbols in which the starring rural community is
emotionally invested—are present. Recalling Carlos Monsivais’s famous comments on
Mexican Golden Age cinema, there is a powerful emotional component to recognizing
one’s own codes and customs on screen, a delight in finding one’s enthusiasm and
catharsis shared. Lauren Berlant might describe it as a type of “normativity . . . a felt
160
condition of general belonging and an aspirational site of rest and recognition in and by a
social world.” (5)
Indeed, at this point Berlant might say the affective realm is fulfilling desires and
providing emotional relief, but at what cost? In her brilliant book on affect, The Female
Complaint, Berlant questions the innocence people tend to automatically grant intimate
spheres. She explores the connection between the political and the satisfying
sentimentality specific to complaint genres of “women's cultures” that tend to blame
flawed men and bad ideologies for women's intimate suffering, all the while maintaining
fidelity to the same world that produced such disappointment in the first place.
“…political and social worlds are inevitably built across fault lines of contradiction and
bad conceptualization that not only do not threaten the general project but make its
endurance possible” (148).
The Pilsen beer commercial I repeatedly return to is a fertile place from which to
think about the interwoven threads of affect, nationalism, fútbol and the market. Berlant
defines an intimate public in a way that interweaves these strands as well:
An intimate public operates when a market opens up to a bloc of consumers,
claiming to circulate texts and things that express those people’s particular core
interests and desires. When this kind of “culture of circulation” takes hold,
participants in the intimate public feel as though it expresses what is common
among them, a subjective likeness that seems to emanate from their history and
their ongoing attachments and actions. (5)
161
The Pilsen beer commercial tries to sell the product by aligning it with the affective
experience that the fútbol fan relates to. Frankfurt makes clear that in the rural space,
fútbol has everything to do with “core interests,” “desires,” “history,” “ongoing
attachments and actions.” The shots of the local game remind us that dedication to fútbol
is not seasonal or restricted to the World Cup: many more people play, coach and
organize the game with serious dedication. Similarly, the product being sold in Frankfurt
could be seen as nationalism itself. But is the feeling that nacionalismo futbolero
expresses as something in common between rural and urban Paraguayans alike more of a
marketing ploy, a rhetorical inclusion, a discursive opiate—than anything else? Is this
Frankfurt’s message? Although Berlant identifies it as something that women's intimate
culture stands for, permission to “live small but to feel large” is also part of nationalist
sentimentality. The intimate sphere of nationalist sentimentality, Berlant argues,
functions as an emotional pacifier for the downtrodden, infantilized citizen: “In a
sentimental worldview, people’s ‘interests’ are less in changing the world than in not
being defeated by it, and meanwhile finding satisfaction in minor pleasures and major
fantasies” (27). Would people agree that fútbol is an opiate for their intimate sphere, but
yet, would they rather have an opiate than nothing?
In the case of Frankfurt's protagonists, the Paraguayan rural poor, their literal
survival is threatened by their conditions. Paraguay is the second poorest country in
South America and the rural poor are at especially high risk given their limited access to
functioning medical, educational and social programs. As I mentioned previously, Jesús
Martín-Barbero describes a progressive rationalism that sees the “indolent and
162
superstitious nature of the populace [as] the fundamental obstacle to development” (189).
This discourse, one that would have the rural poor believe that they are “nobody, or
worse, all wrong” still circulates widely in Paraguay. In discourses of progressive
rationalism with origins in the Enlightenment, popular traditions are seen as the
fragmentary remains of a rural, pre-capitalist past. The tastes of the popular classes are
seen as molded by the corrupting influence of the mass media. Their leisure pastimes are
qualified as nothing more than escapism and their religiosity is seen as a factor of
alienation and ignorance equal to superstition. Their life plans are written off as no more
than frustrated attempts at upward social mobility. All this is embodied in the figure of
the campesino, who is frequently “interchangeable” with the figure of the indio being that
within this discourse, both of them represent fundamental “obstacles” to modernity. The
perceived divide between modernization/rationality and backwardness/emotion is
summarized neatly by Rodolfo Kusch in Indigenous and Popular Thinking in America:
“The industrial society . . . wields rationality; the traditional society wields affectivity”
(118). Does Frankfurt suggest this view of the campesino? Does the presence of the
television, the radio and the cell phone suggest that the campesino is so incapable of
critical thought that the mass media is able to sell them the aformentioned opiates so
easily? Is fútbol just a leisure pastime that offers escapism? Are dreams of becoming a
professional player unrealistic and frustrated attempts at social mobility? Does
Frankfurt’s framing of religious icons suggest ignorance and superstition? Is the emotion
Frankfurt foregrounds represented as evidence of a traditional society wielding
163
affectivity, and simultaneously, its incapacity to wield rationality or to help the nation
move in the direction of “progress” and modernization?
The fact that Frankfurt “submits to judgment without producing a verdict” makes
the answer to these questions ambiguous, but given the fact that Frankfurt uses a point of
view that invites the spectator to relate with the starring campesino families, I would state
that perhaps there is less to do with blame and more to do with relief in its message. As
Berlant explains, “When political desire is failed by politics, participants in the
sentimental tradition have come to choose traumatic cultural mediations as a way of
expressing passionate detachment from politics as such.” (150). Perhaps fútbol fanaticism
here can be seen not simply as an opiate, but as an acknowledgement that politics are
broken. To extend Berlant’s theory beyond Frankfurt, to the entire body of Paraguayan
films that have been produced in the last decade, suggests that perhaps the reason why the
focus on loss and trauma is dominant has something to do with having already “given up”
on politics and finding a passionate way to express that detachment or loss of faith.
Berlant presents the following as mass society’s historical definition of a
collectivity:
…what counts as collectivity has been a loosely organized, market-structured
juxtapolitical sphere of people attached to each other by a sense that there is a
common emotional world available to those individuals who have been marked
by the historical burden of being harshly treated in a generic way and who have
more than survived social negativity by making an aesthetic and spiritual scene
that generates relief from the political. (10)
164
Campesinos in Paraguay have undoubtedly been marked by the historical burden of being
treated as less than their lighter-skinned, Creole counterparts. The fact of the social
hierarchy to which the Paraguayan rural poor are subject is brutal, and the political
institutions to which they have anything that remotely resembles access have failed them
miserably. Berlant states that in an intimate public, the political sphere is more often seen
as a field of threat, chaos, degradation, or retraumatization than a condition of possibility.
That said, it would seem that a Paraguayan nacionalismo futbolero constitutes an intimate
public, a mass cultural genre, and a normative identity.
The potential problem that Berlant locates in the sentimental-political is its
tendency to protect and work in service of the system which causes the suffering. In a
sentimental worldview, people's interests are less in changing the world than in not being
defeated by it, meanwhile finding satisfaction in minor pleasures and major fantasies. A
related characteristic of the sentimental-political as defined by Berlant is optimism for
change without trauma. This is where Frankfurt's ambivalence is greatest. In the scene
where Paraguay loses the game against Sweden, (the game that signals their elimination
from the World Cup), the camera zooms in on the expressions of pain as the men blink
back the tears. The audio is cut so as to allow for silent reflection. Has the fantasy of
winning failed to deliver? Is there any pleasure in the dream of winning, changing the
world and putting Paraguay on the map, so to speak, when the end result is a loss that
mimics millions of losses before it at the hands of stronger nations? Not only is there no
change without trauma, there is more trauma and no change. Does Frankfurt hold up a
165
mirror to the intimate public that constitutes nacionalismo futbolero to ask them to rerecognize themselves, but this time, as losers in the game they have conceded to play?
166
CONCLUSION
Paraguayan film is emerging, and the urgency of this study is clear: the body of
narrative, short and documentary films produced in the past decade present scholars with
a unique opportunity to study contemporary film that represents the nation in a way that
is conceived of as original and foundational. In few places are messages about the
national and its place in the world so clearly laid out for analysis. Paraguayan film offers
a fertile opportunity to see post-dictatorial “transitional” cultural products speaking to the
transition (or lack thereof) in Latin America right now.
Summary of the study
This study begins by providing a review of literature that explores the relationship
between Latin American film, the nation and national identity. It also explores the types
of relationships that exist between national cinema and Hollywood. It reviews film
manifestos from the 1960s, 70s and 80s and scholarship that demonstrates problems with
certain aspects of the goals of those manifestos and what following them actually
produces. The revolutionary politics behind the manifestos and their complicity with the
market are explored.
This study also provides a brief historical contextualization of the Paraguayan
transition from dictatorship to so-called democracy and the coinciding transition from
literature (or void?) to film as the referent for thought defining the nation. It also
167
identifies certain historical and contemporary discourses regarding dictatorship and the
arts in Paraguay.
It provides a context helpful for understanding what it means to be a filmmaker in
Paraguay today. It explores discourses of paraguayidad and what it means to be a
Paraguayan. What does citizenship offer? What are the constraints and guarantees of
participation in Asunción’s society? How do these effect filmmaking? Additionally,
Chapter 1 includes a brief theorization of the effect of the “foreign gaze” in Paraguay
being structured like the “male gaze” is structured in Laura Mulvey’s foundational text,
“Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema.”
This study also analyzes the national/transnational context, form and content of
Un Certain Regard winner of Cannes 2006, Hamaca Paraguaya, widely recognized as
the “before and after” marker par excellence of Paraguayan film: the film that showed
young directors that a Paraguayan film could “be successful” on international screens. In
a double-register, however, this study also demonstrates the problems with this film’s
success in its entrenchment within a cultural, economic and political system reliant on
binaristic and hierarchical identitarian politics: the building blocks of the very discourses
that maintain national and transnational imbalances of power and wealth.
This study uses Hamaca Paraguaya as a foremost example not only because of
the film’s status, but also due to how it exemplifies several dominant trends in
Paraguayan film: setting the story in the rural space, campesino protagonism, Guaraní
dialogue, and a focus on loss as the historical referent. Hamaca Paraguaya’s (2006)
potential for resistance through formal subversion (slowness, silence, absence), historical
168
revisionism, self-reflexivity and political denunciation is explored. Idelber Avelar’s The
Untimely Present, Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning is
deployed to explore connections between allegory, mourning, temporal marks and gender.
Specifically in the exploration of allegory and gender, I bring in two short films, Noche
Adentro (2010) directed by Pablo Lamar and Karai Norte (2009) directed by Marcelo
Martinessi.
The transnational power structure is described as a palimpsest against which
Paraguayan film is necessarily constructed and how this bleeds through into Hamaca as a
cultural product. I explore the potential problems in how the mestizo campesino
protagonist par excelance of Paraguayan film is represented—an argument that extends
itself into a discussion of the “right place” of cinemas of the “third world” and film
festivals of the “first world.” This chapter relies heavily upon the work of Rey Chow.
Chapter 3 also includes a section entitled “Temporalization, Racialization and
Gendering” which explores the problematic of the marriage of otherness, identity, the
past, race, nature and development discourse through some of the concepts of Walter
Benjamin, Anne McClintock, Franz Fanon, Stuart Hall, Sigmund Freud, and Anne Cheng.
In Chapter 4 I argue that the preoccupation with cultural “authenticity” in
Paraguayan film can be read as the trace of the transnational nature of film production;
authenticity/transnationality enter into a double bind. I analyze Frankfurt (2006) in light
of this, and also as a documentary that creates parallels between Paraguay’s historical
border wars and the effects of present-day global neoliberal capitalism. I also explore
Frankfurt’s ambiguity on the relationship between the market, the state and the church. I
169
include a discussion on what melancholia may mean for politics in Paraguayan film.
Finally, I explore what Frankfurt represents about how affect operates through
nacionalismo futbolero, producing specific results along specific lines of race and with
specific market effects, a reading in which I rely on Lauren Berlant and Jesús MartínBarbero.
Methodology
This dissertation uses a three-pronged, cultural studies approach: I consider the
text (the plot and dialogue of the films), the form (camera angles, how sound is employed,
editing among other technical and stylistic choices) and the context (socio-political and
historical conditions under which these cultural products were developed.) I use
theoretical tools from the cultural studies tool box, such as political economics, film
studies, Latin American studies and psychoanalysis. Some of the questions I address in
this study are: what is the particular power structure involved in the production of this
object of study? What are the ideologies being activated? What are the points of
connection between social class, (economics) nationality, ethnicity, sexuality, and/or
gender in this equation?
Another piece of my methodology involves a transnational approach, a move I see
as essential for any study of the nation, doing for the nation what the concept of gender
does for sexed bodies: “provide the conceptual deconstruction that denaturalizes all their
deployments, compelling us to acknowledge that the nation, like sex, is a thing contested,
170
interrupted, and always shot through with contradiction” (627, Briggs, McCormick, Way).
The transnational approach allows me to couch this study in the assumption of
nationalism as ideology. As an approach, it integrates an acknowledgement of the force
of nationalism, imperialist aggression and their linkage with capitalist formation. I use a
transnational approach in my dissertation as I explore the dominance of a particular
essentialized national identity in narrative and documentary film in Paraguay. I argue that
this iconic protagonist and space (the campesino in the rural setting) is not simply the site
of “true Paraguayan authenticity,” but rather, the product of competing national and
transnational forces, specifically due to the way these films are funded.
Feminist theory is also an essential part of my approach. Here I must be clear that
to me, feminisms embody a variety of theoretical tools that can be deployed with the end
goal of achieving equality, especially through the visibilization of inequality. Historically
feminism has been represented as a series of movements aimed at defining, establishing,
and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for
women, however, the term feminism is now far more capacious in regards to
understanding that equality must come for all in order to come for anyone. Highlighting
that feminisms are an important part of this study is essential, in my purview, given the
current penchants for using terms like “postfeminist” and “postracial.” The real work of
feminism and critical race studies is not done. Issues of representation in Paraguayan film
make it apparent that the tools of feminism are urgently required to carry out a sufficient
analysis of this body of emergent films.
171
Major Findings
In researching Latin American film manifestos from the 60s, 70s and 80s,
Paraguayan film seems to be directly informed by an ideology that calls for countering
Hollywood production in form and content while calling for the support of the Latin
American state itself. Realism and “authentic representation” of a particular segment of
the Paraguayan population seem to be a major focus of Paraguayan film, a focus that
comes directly from the revolutionary goals of the aforementioned manifestos. While
Latin American film at large has moved beyond these goals and in fact is not shy about
producing Hollywood-style box office hits, Paraguayan film seems to mark a “return to
the origins,” which is congruent with the ways in which Paraguayan directors see
themselves: as creating the foundational fictions on which an entire body of national film
will be built. Also, the persistent problems of these manifestos can be found in
Paraguayan film’s reiterations: an unsophisticated view of how realism and authenticity
can be achieved, a lack of acknowledgement of how, in representation, technology
mediates reality; and in terms of “authenticity,” originality is constructed far more than it
can be “proven.”
The focus on representing mestizo, campesino protagonists as the essence of
paraguayidad visibilizes a public who have been historically nearly invisible. The
colonial legacy of racial casts bleeds through into Paraguayan broadcasting and
advertising: to sell anything, one must also sell the highest social status, which
traditionally features light skin and eyes. For Paraguayan directors to feature people of
172
brown skin and more indigenous features marks an empowering moment of selfrecognition for many. The other side of coin, however, has to do with what that move
actually produces in the broader context of international film festivals and Paraguayan
representation on a global scale: an exoticisized paraguayidad which plays the role of a
binaristic negative identity contrasted against the “developed world.” Brown campesinos
shown living on nearly nothing are oppositionally constructed against their “first world”
trace: light-skinned, middle to upper class urbanites of the “developed world.” To
borrow a phrase from Rey Chow, Paraguayan film becomes yet another example of “the
native in their proper frame:” a spectator’s observation could easily be “Of course
Paraguay is part of the third world, they live in the past!” Global uneven distribution of
wealth is explained away; it becomes “only natural” that a people so close to the dirt, so
rooted in the past, would not be able to complete in the global marketplace. Their cause is
beyond rescue, they are Others virtually beyond comprehension. Using the perspective
that Gareth Williams puts forth, taking the popular underclass and elevating them to the
level of national icon is a rhetorical inclusion that has historically done little else in Latin
America beside help quell social tensions through empty cultural offerings while
maintaining the status quo. This also brings up broader questions about what identitarian
politics are good for and who benefits the most from their deployment.
While Paraguayan film is political in terms of its allegorical treatment of the
nation, it is, perhaps surprisingly, lacking in terms of material that takes on Paraguay’s
political history in a literal sense. Other Latin American film productions take on the
topic of military dictatorships quite directly. Why then is there a type of erasure of the
173
Stroessner dictatorship in Paraguayan film? To answer this question it is helpful to look
at the historical and present narratives of dictatorship in Paraguay. Paraguay was founded
on dictatorship by Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia. The period of his regime lives on in the
national imaginary as one of the most self-sufficient, egalitarian and wealthy periods of
Paraguayan history. Perhaps this helps explain why the Stroessner dictatorship was one
of the 14th longest rules anywhere by a state leader other than a monarch. Popular
nostalgia for the Stroessner dictatorship is still circulating so broadly that it has a name:
the “Éramos felices y no lo sabíamos” discourse. Indeed, it is has been difficult to talk
about a real transition period or to speak of democracy when so many of the people who
hold political clout, power and land in Paraguay are from the same families that had
important ties to the Stroessner dictatorship. A clannish societal structure that protects
people from a weak legal system, but also from criticism, is described poignantly by
director Ramiro Gómez when he says “Este es el país de los incombustibles” (personal
interview). It is hard to find people who would say that “democracy” has been good for
Paraguay when the standard of living is lower overall due to higher crime, unemployment
and unequal distribution of wealth. Feasibly, Paraguayan directors do not see the
dictatorship as the specific problem requiring the most urgent attention, but rather, the
corruption and lack of committed public service that continues to contribute to
Paraguay’s current status as holder of one of the highest Ghini coefficients in Latin
America.
Another legacy of the dictatorship has to do with Paraguayan directors finding
themselves having to prove the cultural value of film. The dictatorship was more
174
concerned with squelching critical thought and creativity than nurturing it. Paraguay’s
economic condition has made “culture” out to be something that only a small elite
segment of the population can understand, appreciate or produce. What move then, does a
cultural product have to make in order to gain relevancy and legitimacy in this context?
Whereas “culture,” particularly literary culture, contributed to what Canclini calls “a
divorce between the elites and the people” (94), Paraguayan film tries to suture this
divide by introducing symbolic goods already in circulation among “the people,”
particularly campesinos, via a more accessible visual medium. Whereas this move helps
increase relevancy amongst the masses, couching Paraguayan film in the origins of
national patrimony increases relevancy amongst the established cultural elite. Canclini
defines “being cultured” as “grasp[ing] a body of knowledge—largely iconographic—
about one’s own history, and also to participate in the stagings in which hegemonic
groups have society present itself with a scene of its origin” (109). Canclini also explains
how this belief is congruent with the basis of authoritarian cultural policies that use
original, foundational substance as indicative of the correct path for today’s policies.
Paraguayan film represents an instance that upholds tradition while modernizing it
through the forward thrust of media technology. The question remains: does this do more
to maintain the status quo, suturing over difference in a rhetorical rescue, or does is it
create space for those who have been traditionally excluded to operationalize the icons of
the nation for their own use?
It is important to remember Gareth William’s argument that the populist,
rhetorical inclusion of the cultural icons of the lowest classes, elevated to the level of the
175
national symbolic, has traditionally served to suture over the racial wounds/class
divisions produced by the colonialist moment, quelling social tensions that threaten the
status quo. The coup d’etat that ended the Stroessner dictatorship and the events of Marzo
Paraguay—which threatened to return the nation to dictatorship under Lino Oviedo—
have occurred within the lifetimes of the directors who are producing work now. In light
of this fact and the nostalgia for dictatorship that exists, particularly among the working
class, we must ask if the social emergency Paraguayan film seeks to address is in fact the
risk of losing the political freedoms and freedoms of expression that have been gained
through the “transition” period. How to get the working classes to support democracy
when it has not come into its own? A “solution” might be a quest for greater equality
across classes, but how could films achieve that? When trafficking in national symbols,
there are many more examples of how to achieve rhetorical inclusion rather than equality,
whether its promises are empty or not.
Depending on the angle, an embrace of national symbols and culture in Paraguay
can be seen as an empowering and radical movement. On one hand, people in Paraguay
are acutely aware of the nation’s “development ranking” on a global scale. An alignment
with foreign culture has operated as a badge of cultural sophistication, means and
worldliness. Conversely, a writing-off of nationally produced culture and goods as
inferior has been part of the behavior signs read as “good taste” and “high standards.” In
this sense, Paraguayan film is fighting a status quo by not only insisting on the
dominance of populist, local symbols, but also by introducing them at international film
festivals for all the world to see.
176
Similarly, nationalism takes on a revolutionary tone when one considers how the
Paraguayan government has historically “sold out” to its neighbors. Mariana Vazquez’s
documentary, Soberanía Violada (2006), depicts the “dark side” of the widely celebrated
soy agroindustry that has boosted Paraguay’s economic growth on a macroeconomic
level. Soberanía Violada depicts the microeconomic and ecological effects: the story of a
government who allows foreign (mostly Brazilian) investors to take advantage of
subsistence farmers in order to acquire their land at low prices, polluting the land and
water in the process.
On the other hand, however, while Paraguayan film’s content is so focused on the
national, a study of its context shows the film “industry’s” dependence on transnational
processes. Similarly to the case of tango in Argentina, it is possible that Paraguayan film
would not be have been able to attain recognition, valuation and status if it had not
become a product for export. The “first world” stamp of approval that comes from
winning at European film festivals such as Cannes (and in lesser degree, at U.S. film
festivals) has a similar effect as the embrace of tango in Paris, London and New York had
for elevating tango to the level of icon of argentinidad. On an even more literal and
practical level, most funding for Paraguayan film projects is in fact extranational. The
most profitable funding structure for Paraguayan film involves winning seed money from
international film festivals and/or foreign NGOs. While this is the primary way in which
Paraguayan film is transnational (crafted for the foreign gaze) there are many others.
At first glance it may seem ironic that Paraguayan nationalist sentiment is
contingent upon the foreign gaze. This moment of identitarian politics is particularly
177
fruitful for exploring how an essentializing nationalism is in fact dependent on
transnational practices. Any cultural moment that insists on cultural purity and
authenticity is haunted by its trace: cultural isolation, purity and uniqueness are myths
that obscure our interconnected and transnational reality. Paul Willemen’s statements
about nationalism are particularly helpful for making sense of this “irony:” he argues that
the West created the “problem” of national identity for the colonized territories as part of
imperialism. It follows then, to state that nationalism obscures the colonial legacy—
particularly, the market and its resulting class positions—in service of those who profit
most from that system.
Hamaca Paraguaya is a film that is highly representational of the trends in
Paraguayan film today, in part, due to the way in which it set the tone for Paraguayan
film at large as a success story. A double-register is most helpful for an analysis of this
film, being that is embodies the double-bind of Paraguayan film in general: a focus on
representing an essentializing paraguayaidad that from one angle, holds revolutionary
potential as advocacy for the rural class and a denunciation of the State, while from the
other angle, feeds into a cultural, economic and political system reliant on binaristic and
hierarchical identitarian politics in service of national and transnational inequity.
Hamaca Paraguaya uses long shots and indirect camera angles, slowness,
disjointed audio, and absence in such a way that echos Latin American film manifestos
from the sixties and seventies call for non-standard language and formal resistance as
necessary in the struggle for decolonization. While the director, Paz Encina, does not
explain her formal choices in these terms, one can make connections between the
178
descriptions of her intimate rationale and certain denunciations regarding a powerstructure under which she operates as a filmmaker and a Paraguayan. Hamaca’s slowness
creates resistance through a labor reversal between the film and the spectator; its
unspoken speech reflexively calls attention to the impossibility of presenting one family’s
story as the story of a larger, heterogeneous people; and its use of absence attempts to
escape the trap that visibility itself can tend. One could also conceptualize Hamaca’s
campesino protagonism as what Rancière might call the miscount; a moment in which
politics truly occurs: the logics of domination and equality clash, as at the level of
representation, there is a taking part of those who have no part; the rural, brown-skinned
poor. Hamaca’s historical revisionism re-writes the glory of the Chaco War into a story
about loss heaped upon loss, about a State that takes the only thing a couple has: their son.
When examining Hamaca as a record of violence, as a film about mourning and
potentially a way to mourn in of itself, a disturbing question arises: does Paraguayan
film’s melancholic obsession with loss, denunciation and victimization transmit an
embedded message of doom? Is a focus on things staying the same, a history repeated
also send a hopeless message: “this has never and will never change”? Does Hamaca
serve as a reminder that the State has exploited the people and will continue to do so in a
way that only reifies a paraguayidad that is submissive and devoid of any revolutionary
aspirations? Does melancholia help facilitate politics by creating a wounded attachment
in which we are constantly reminded of the present/past conditions of violence, so as to
keep outrage alive, or does melancholia hermetically seal victimhood and an unending
cycle of self-impoverishment? This question requires further exploration.
179
A gender analysis of Hamaca Paraguaya, Noche Adentro and Kara’í Norte
demonstrates the connections between gender, allegory, mourning, and temporal marks.
The body, gendered female, represents a site for potential disorder and systemic reversal.
In Hamaca, it is Cándida, as mother who is able to cut through the rhetoric of war: her
grief makes masculinist loyalty to violence and the nation into a foolish, misguided and
empty calling. Noche Adentro presents a bride’s body as the site in which systemic State
violence is represented by a graphic and powerful visual allegory made all the more
shocking through its juxtaposition with the romance script. Similarly, Karai Norte sparks
outrage through the figure of an elderly, poor woman, who is raped by thieves. In this
case, denunciation is not aimed strictly at the State, but rather, at everyone who is
complicit with the oppression of the poor (she suspects locals were the perpetrators of the
crime). Although these instances feminize victimization with powerful results, their
resistant potential is ambiguous, given the tradition of situating gender within the
domestication of national time. Anne McClintock describes how women have been
represented as the “authentic body of national tradition” while men represent “the
progressive agent of national modernity” (92). In this sense, one must ask if the use of the
body gendered female for allegorical purposes is not in line with melancholic cycle that
actually refuses the substitution of the historic position of inescapable exploitation and
victimization.
The “winning formula” of Paraguayan film requires the mestizo campesino and
the rural space. For success at international film festivals, and even to score money for
developing the project in the first place, it is necessary to produce an image that is
180
distinctly different from the images seen in film of the developing world. This
requirement is visible in the very language certain film festivals use: a language that
describes the “third world” as a place of lack, that can only produce “authentic” art of
value through the assistance of “first world” funds. What gets produced in the process of
shaping work to appeal to festivals and funders is what Rey Chow calls cross-commodity
fetishism; the production of value between cultures.
Within Paraguayan film the mestizo campesino is repeatedly rooted in the past
and in nature and Paraguay is mythologized as a pre-capitalist space, but also, its third
world condition “makes sense” given that the rural poor are rooted in the earth and the
past are a drag on the great machine of progress. The lack of technology/modernity in
these films contributes to placing paraguayidad in a temporal frame that belongs to the
global past. As Walter Benjamin has demonstrated regarding nineteenth-century
industrial capitalism and commodity production, in order for the “new” to exist the “old”
must be constructed. In the case of Paraguayan film, European audiences can confirm
their own modernity and development with “evidence” from Paraguayan film; “There is
the past, and it is not like any life we could imagine or make films about.”
A series of binaries come together in relation to the past, linking temporal
construction to race, gender, nature, and lack. The people who are closest to the past are
also closest to nature (the campesino) and the brownest. As representational of
Paraguay’s “lagging ranking” in terms of development, they represent the obstacles to
progress and modernization; “nuestra indiocincracia” as one person commented in an
informal conversation. Coupled with this is the feminization of Paraguay through which
181
its “backwardness” is explained: the loss of the majority of the male population in the
Triple Alliance War forced the female population to rebuild the nation: a moment of
fragmentation of the nuclear family, fragmentation of the nation and feminization.
(Perhaps this mode of thinking also contributes to the trend of using the body gendered
female in Paraguayan film as the allegorical site for the nation.) This binaristic set:
temporality (past), race (brown), gender (female), nature (tradition), and lack (poverty)
function as a postcolonial ideological cocktail neatly set up to construct and rationalize a
Paraguayan identity in line with the interests of the dominant class within Paraguay and
the dominant class on a global scale (the “developed” world).
Anne Cheng’s definition of “Indian Melancholy” is helpful for exploring this
situation. She describes the phenomenon as the way in which U.S. culture “romanticizes
and naturalizes the ‘cult of the vanishing Indians’” (14). In this way, from
marginalization to genocide, the extinguishing of the indigenous becomes blameless.
Just as the past is something that must inevitably be lost, so it the Indian, who sadly—but
inevitably—must fade away also. It is worth recalling at this point, that the binaristic sets
aligned into these sequences of “logic” are not specific to Paraguay, but rather, are
specific to imperialism.
A Paraguayan documentary that breaks with this binaristic set enough to create a
productive ambiguity is Frankfurt (2008), directed by Ramiro Gómez. Frankfurt creates
a space for slippage in the past/future, tradition/progress binary by introducing the
television as a major protagonist in the rural space: it is always present, like another
member of the family. Frankfurt also breaks with the authenticity myth in the sense that
182
it draws the “first world” into the narrative, potentially introducing questions about
identity formation and who it serves. Fanon’s words echo here: “Let us have the courage
to say it outright: It is the racist who creates his inferior” (93). Frankfurt (re)presents an
opportunity to explore not only nationalism itself, but also, the transnational side of
nationalism, and does more to draw attention to the market (along with Soberanía
Violada), than most Paraguayan films. It also suggests relationships between the Market,
the State and the Church that functioned well in service of authoritarianism, and
potentially continue to work well in service of neoliberalism.
Conclusions and Implications
In the course of developing this project I come away with several considerations I
am committed to leading with as part of my analytical approach. In regards to cultural
studies analysis, I must add temporality to the axis of social structure inclusive of race,
class and gender. Power relations are integrally linked to how peoples, places and
products are temporalized: that is, related to the past, present or future. Temporalization
and how it is intertwined with race, gender, class, nationality and "ranking" in the
evolutionist-Enlightenment notion of progress should never go unnoticed.
In the field of visual studies, I argue that images neatly placing “third world
natives” in their “proper frames” and laying claims to “modernity” (meaning
development and enlightenment) by having taken a “subaltern term” (toward the
underprivileged), are likely more accurately described as products of cultural hegemony.
183
An alignment with the subaltern does not automatically constitute a revolutionary turn,
by any means.
In regards to film studies, analysis of any national body of film must also
investigate the forces at play in the conditions of cinematic production in order to shed
light on how and why nationality is treated like a genre (vs. horror, drama, comedy, etc.).
Latin American film studies needs to seek ways to break with the traditional, uncritical
modus operandi of privileging the relation of film to the nation. If this break is not
achieved, national cinema will continue to be reduced to an analysis that quickly finds it
limit in enunciations based in two fundamental concepts: identity and difference. Part of
what I suggest as an antidote involves focusing on the transnationality of film production
and analyzing it with regards to power structures implicit in funding mechanisms and
how these echo historical colonial relationships.
Perhaps the most troubling of the implications of this work for Latin American
studies involves a grave consideration: analysis of paraguayidad must consider that an
essential part of Paraguayan national identity is formulated in such a way that directly
contributes to ideologies that help justify/explain away radically unequal distribution of
wealth and power.
We are “no longer waiting for Paraguayan film” to borrow a phrase from Hugo
Gamarra. It is here, now, and it offers a specific opportunity for analysis that should not
be overlooked. Paraguayan film does not simply present audiences with a “Paraguayan
way of life,” but rather, through its content, form and context, presents an opportunity for
184
visibilizing the pitfalls of current dominant methodologies used for making
determinations about film at large.
185
REFERENCES
"Ampliando horizontes: Emigración Internacional Paraguaya." Programa de las
Naciones Unidas para el Desarrollo. Naciones Unidas, 2009. Web. 30 Mar 2012.
<http://www.undp.org.py/images_not/INDH 2009 Migracion.pdf>.
Avelar, Idelber. The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the
Task of Mourning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. Print.
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1972. Print.
Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. London: NLB, 1977. Print.
Benjamin, Walter, and Rolf Tiedemann. The Arcades Project. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap
Press, 1999. Print.
Berlant, Lauren G. The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in
American Culture. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. Print.
"Berlinale Professionals World Cinema Fund WCF Profile." Berlinale. Web. 18 Sept.
2011.
<http://www.berlinale.de/en/branche/world_cinema_fund/wcf_profil/index.html>.
Brucke, Sonia. Personal Interview by Eva Karene Romero. 26 July 2010. Digital
Recording.
Burns, E B. Latin America: A Concise Interpretive History. Englewood Cliffs, N.J:
Prentice-Hall, 1990. Print.
Cardozo, Efraim. Breve Historia del Paraguay, 2007. Servilibro, Asunción. Print.
Cheng, Anne. The Melancholia of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Print.
Chow, Rey. Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary
Chinese Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Print.
186
Coronel, Bernardo. "Avance Sojero y Pobreza." E'a Periodico de Interpretacion y
Analysis. E'a Periodico de Interpretacion y Analysis, 3 december 2011. Web. 30 Mar
2012. <http://ea.com.py/avance-sojero-y-pobreza/>.
Costa, Renate. Personal Interview by Eva Karene Romero. July 2008. Digital Recording.
Cuenca, Manuel. "Audiovisuales en el Paraguay." (Unpublished). Print.
Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Postcolonial Perspectives. Eds. Anne
McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat. Minneapolis: University of Minnesotta
Press, 1997. Print.
Debin, Megan Lorraine. "Cleansing with Blood: Margolles’s What Else Could We Talk
About?" Tepoztlán Institute for the Transnational History of the Americas 2011.
Tepoztlán, Morelos, Mexico. Aug. 2011. In Person.
Duggan, Lisa. The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack
on Democracy. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003. Print.
Ďurovičová, Natasa, and Kathleen E. Newman. World Cinemas, Transnational
Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 2010. Print.
"En el Día del Idioma Guaraní, la lengua reclama su justo lugar." Ultima Hora 25 Aug
2009. Web. 14 Oct. 2011. <http://www.ultimahora.com/notas/249443-En-el-Día-delIdioma--Guaraní,-la-lengua-reclama-su-justo-lugar>.
Encina, Paz. Personal Interview by Eva Karene Romero. 2008. Digital Recording.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 1967. Print.
----. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1965. Print.
Frankfurt. Dir. Ramiro Gómez. (Undistributed), 2008. DVD.
Gamarra Etcheverry, Hugo. "Existe El Cine Paraguayo?" Cinemas d'Amerique latine 11
(2003): 35-40. Print.
---. "A La Espera Del Cine Paraguayo." Cinemas d'Amerique latine 14 (2006): 144. Print.
---. "What does Cinema Mean for Paraguay?" Senses of Cinema 21 (2002): 1 - 4. Print.
García, Canclini N. Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity.
Minneapolis, Minn: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Print.
187
Gledhill, Christine. "Recent Developments in Feminist Criticism." Quarterly Review of
Film Studies. 3.4 (1978): 457-493. Print.
Gómez, Ramiro. "En debate: Reflexiones sobre "un posible cine paraguayo"." Ultima
Hora, 04 Aug 2010. Web. 30 Mar 2012. <http://www.ultimahora.com/notas/345681En-debate:-Reflexiones-sobre-un-posible-cine-paraguayo>.
Hamaca Paraguaya. Dir.Paz Encina. Transeuropa Video Entertainment, 2006. DVD.
Hall, Stuart. "Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation." Film and Theory: An
Anthology. Eds. Robert Stam and Toby Miller.Blackwell Publishers, 2000. 704-714.
Print.
Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford; New York: Oxford University
Press, 2005. Print.
Hjort, Mette, and Scott MacKenzie. Cinema and Nation. London: Routledge, 2000. Print.
“International Film Festival Roterdam Hubert Bals Fund.” International Film Festival
Roterdam. Web. 18 Sept. 2011. <http://www.filmfestivalrotterdam.com/en/hbf/>.
"Is wi support of de nashonal sings?" Clip. June 2010: 14-15. Print.
Karai Norte. Dir. Marcelo Martinessi. 2009. DVD.
King, John. Magical Reels: A History of Cinema in Latin America. London: Verso, 1990.
Print.
Kusch, Rodolfo. El Pensamiento Indígena y Popular En América., 1977. Print.
Lamar, Pablo. Personal Interview by Eva Karene Romero. August 2010. Digital
Recording.
Levinson, Brett. The Ends of Literature: the Latin American "Boom" in the Neoliberal
Marketplace. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2001. Print.
Lund, Joshua. The Impure Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesotta Press,
2006. Print.
Martin, Michael T. New Latin American Cinema. Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
1997. Print.
Martín B., Jesús. Communication, Culture and Hegemony: From the Media to
Mediations. London; Newbury Park: SAGE Publications, 1993. Print.
188
Meilicke, Pablo. Personal Interview by Eva Karene Romero. July 2008. Digital
Recording.
McClintock, Anne, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat. Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation,
and Postcolonial Perspectives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Print.
Mraz, John. Looking for Mexico: Modern Visual Culture and National Identity. Durham
[N.C.]: Duke University Press, 2009. Print.
Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Feminisms. Ed. Robyn R.
Warhol and Diane Price Herndl. 2nd ed. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1975.
Print.
Netto Sissa, Augusto. Personal Interview by Eva Karene Romero. July 2010.
Noche Adentro. Dir. Pablo Lamar. 2009. DVD.
Noriega, Chon A. Visible Nations: Latin American Cinema and Video. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Print.
O'Gorman, Edmundo. La Invención de América: investigación acerca de la estructura
histórica del nuevo mundo y del sentido de su devenir. México, D.F.: Cultura SEP :
Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1984. Print.
Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge, 1993. Print.
Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York:
Routledge, 1992. Print.
Rancière, Jacques. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1999. Print.
Rios, Anibal. Personal Interview by Eva Karene Romero. July 2008. Digital Recording.
Rowe, William, and Vivian Schelling. Memory and Modernity: Popular Culture in Latin
America. London: Verso, 1991. Print
Ruskola, Teemu. "Raping Like a State." UCLA Law Review. 57. (2010): 1477. Print.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.
189
Schoonover, Karl. "Wastrels of Time: Slow Cinema and its Laboring Subjects " Society
for Cinema and Media Studies Conference 2011. Society for Cinema and Media
Studies. The Ritz Carleton, New Orleans. 12 March 2011. In Person.
Skidmore, Thomas E., and Peter H. Smith. Modern Latin America. Sixth ed. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2005. Print.
Soberanía Violada. Dir. Malu Vazquez. 2007. DVD.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" In: Cary Nelson and
Lawrence Grossberg eds. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Urbana: U of
Illinois Press, 1988. Print.
----. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Methuen, 1987. Print.
Talbott, Michael. "European Film Festivals and Contemporary ‘World Cinema.’" Society
for Cinema and Media Studies Conference 2011. Society for Cinema and Media
Studies. The Ritz Carleton, New Orleans. 12 March 2011. In Person.
Tejada, Roberto. National Camera: Photography and Mexico's Image Environment.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Print.
Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader Ed. Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden,
Routledge, London, 2006. Migrancy and the Latin American Cinemascape: Towards
a Post-National Critical Praxis by Anne Marie Stock
Valdovinos, Roberto Andrés. Personal Interview b y E v a R o m e r o . 1 3 J u l y 2 0 0 8 .
Vitali, Valentina, and Paul Willemen. Theorising National Cinema. London: British Film
Institute, 2006. Print.
White, Richard A. Paraguay's Autonomous Revolution, 1810-1840. Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1978. Print.
"World Cinema Fund Profile." Berlinale . Berlinale, n.d. Web. 14 Jun 2011.
<http://www.berlinale.de/en/das_festival/world_cinema_fund/wcf_profil/index.ht>.
Williams, Gareth. The Other Side of the Popular: Neoliberalism and Subalternity in Latin
America. Durham, NC : Duke UP, 2002.