Peruvian Cinema of the Twenty-First Century: Dynamic and Unstable Grounds [1st ed.] 9783030525118, 9783030525125

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xviii
Introduction (Cynthia Vich, Sarah Barrow)....Pages 1-26
Front Matter ....Pages 27-27
Peru’s Twenty-First-Century Rom-Com (Carolina Sitnisky)....Pages 29-45
Con Nariz (blanqui-)roja: Peruvian Comedy, Marca Perú and ¡Asu Mare! (Jeffrey Middents)....Pages 47-64
Peruvian Regional Cinema: Transtextuality, Gender and Violence in Bullying maldito, la historia de María Marimacha (Emilio Bustamante)....Pages 65-83
Creativity and Perseverance in a Precarious Context: Filmmaking in Ayacucho Between Artistic Vision and Lived Reality (Martha-Cecilia Dietrich)....Pages 85-102
Filming Horror in Post-conflict Peru: Making and Marketing La casa rosada (María Eugenia Ulfe)....Pages 103-120
In Search of an Audience: Cinema of Northern Peru, the Case of Omar Forero (Sarah Barrow)....Pages 121-141
Wiñaypacha by Oscar Catacora: Overcoming Indigenismo Through Intimacy and Slowness (Maria Chiara D’Argenio)....Pages 143-159
The Promise of Authenticity: Doing and Undoing the Cinematic Tourist Gaze in Claudia Llosa’s Short Films (Daniella Wurst)....Pages 161-179
Local Grounding, Transnational Reach: The Films of Héctor Gálvez (María Helena Rueda)....Pages 181-197
The Peruvian Short Film: Styles and Treatments of Memory, Politics, and Violence (Ricardo Bedoya)....Pages 199-216
The Political Blockages of Peruvian Memory Cinema (Alexandra Hibbett)....Pages 217-235
Historical Memory and Cinematic Adaptations: Three Films Based on the Novels of Alonso Cueto (Javier Protzel)....Pages 237-255
Do Executioners Have Souls? La última tarde and La hora final: Representations of the “Insurgent” Character in Peruvian Fiction Cinema (Karen Bernedo)....Pages 257-276
Front Matter ....Pages 277-277
No Concessions: Aesthetics and Politics in the Cinema of Eduardo Quispe Alarcón (Cynthia Vich)....Pages 279-301
“Toward a Cinema for Life”: The Activism of the Escuela de Cine Amazónico (Claudia Arteaga)....Pages 303-319
Bursting Lima’s Film Bubble: Women in the Contemporary Nonfiction Filmic Scene in Peru (Isabel Seguí)....Pages 321-341
Back Matter ....Pages 343-356

Citation preview

Peruvian Cinema of the Twenty-First Century Dynamic and Unstable Grounds

Edited by Cynthia Vich · Sarah Barrow

Peruvian Cinema of the Twenty-First Century “This volume brings together scholars from Peru, Europe and the United States whose well-researched and lucid essays situate Peruvian film production within a global context of funding and circulation while also paying attention to salient aspects of this national cinema such as regional films and the examination of recent Peruvian history. The breadth of this collective volume makes it an essential reading for those interested in Latin American cinema as well as those who specialize in Peruvian culture.” —Carolina Rocha, Professor of Spanish, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, USA, author of Masculinities in Contemporary Popular Argentine Cinema (2012) “This ground-breaking collection uniquely illuminates the vibrant panorama of contemporary Peruvian cinema. For too long Peruvian cinema has been known globally only for its internationally feted art films (e.g. Claudia Llosa’s remarkable The Milk of Sorrow). Now the full picture comes into sharp focus, also recognising Peru’s rom coms for the metropolitan masses, artisanal digital indies for the regions, local community documentaries, female-led non-fiction, shorts, experimental and indigenous filmmaking. Undoubtedly this will be a “go to” text for Peruvian cinema for at least the next decade. It is also a crucial text for our understanding of the cinemas of the world as an interconnected transnational totality, and how specific national cinemas function uniquely even in that globalized context.” —David Martin-Jones, Professor of Film Studies, University of Glasgow, author of Cinema Against Doublethink: Ethical Encounters with the Lost Pasts of World History (2018) “Peruvian Cinema of the Twenty-First Century offers a rich account and makes a convincing case for seeing the Peruvian films of the 21st century as a distinct body of work. The conditions for a more diverse, more regionalized, but also more globalized Peruvian cinema are convincingly sought in the emergence of a neoliberal agenda in Peru, itself enabled by the ending of a twenty-year-long civil war. It usefully charts the changing landscape of Peru’s film legislation while offering a cogent grouping of the films, the aim being to clarify the different aspirations of contemporary Peruvian filmmakers and the diversity of their approaches to film production and audience building. With its powerful evocation of the significance and achievements of the new Peruvian cinema, along with the serious challenges it faces, this fine collection makes a most welcome contribution to the study of ‘small’ national cinemas.” —Mette Hjort, Professor of Humanities and Dean of Arts, Hong Kong Baptist University, HK, author of The Cinema of Small Nations (2007)

Cynthia Vich · Sarah Barrow Editors

Peruvian Cinema of the Twenty-First Century Dynamic and Unstable Grounds

Editors Cynthia Vich Department of Modern Languages and Literatures Fordham University New York, NY, USA

Sarah Barrow School of Art, Media and American Studies University of East Anglia Norwich, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-52511-8 ISBN 978-3-030-52512-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52512-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Still image from the film A punto de despegar (2015), directed by Lorena Best and Robinson Díaz. Used with permission This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank all the people who have made this volume possible. First and foremost, our thanks go to our fourteen fellow contributors, for their remarkable scholarly contributions and the precise work they put into their chapters, from the initial abstracts to the careful scrutiny of their drafts. We really appreciated the robust and rigorous conversations we were able to have with them. We would also like to express our gratitude to all colleagues who provided kind support or recognition, not least our peer reviewers, for writing very helpful feedback on our proposal, kick-starting the project in an auspicious manner. We want to acknowledge the financial support from our institutions: Fordham University’s Office of Research and University of East Anglia’s Arts and Humanities research grants scheme, for supporting the editorial processes. We particularly want to acknowledge the crucial role played by Carolina Sitnisky in the conceptualization of this project. In addition, our thanks go to Carl Fischer who was such a generous source of advice and support. At Palgrave, we are grateful for the support of all involved in making the book a reality, from editors to typesetters to graphic designers. In particular, our thanks go to Shaun Vigil for his support for our book proposal, as well as Glenn Ramírez and Liam McLean, for their editorial guidance, and Preetha Kuttiappan for overseeing the production phase. We also wish to thank Victoria Jara, for copy-editing the manuscript in a precise and thorough manner; and Arthur Dixon for all the translation v

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

work which has enabled us to bring the work of Peruvian scholars to an Anglophone readership. A special thank you also goes to Lorena Best, who most efficiently and generously provided the powerful image from her film A punto de despegar for our front cover. We wish to thank and pay tribute to all the remarkable filmmakers who, through their work and ideas, inspired us to put this collection together, from its inception to the latest stages of production. They have helped us in so many ways in the preparation of our articles, which has given us the chance to converse with many of them at length about the ideas behind their films and about cinema in general. We are so grateful for their generosity. Finally, we wish to thank our families, particularly Alberto and Sergio (Cynthia), and David (Sarah), for supporting this long-distance collaboration in so many ways. Last but not least, we would like to celebrate the completion of this book and the enriching experience that its preparation brought to both of us. We proved to ourselves that we could write together, simultaneously (and thanks to technology), over two to three hour periods while on different continents and time zones. We deeply enjoyed our writing sessions, where time simply flew, and where we had the opportunity to get to know each other at many levels, to be able to thoroughly discuss our ideas, to share our doubts, and to do this with a sense of humor. We will certainly miss writing together, but we also know that this has been just the beginning of a longer, fruitful, companionship.

Contents

1

Introduction Cynthia Vich and Sarah Barrow

PART I

1

THE MARKET DYNAMICS OF PERUVIAN CINEMA

Big Budget Film for Local Entertainment 2

Peru’s Twenty-First-Century Rom-Com Carolina Sitnisky

3

Con Nariz (blanqui-)roja: Peruvian Comedy, Marca Perú and ¡Asu Mare! Jeffrey Middents

29

47

vii

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CONTENTS

Regional Low Budget Drama 4

5

6

Peruvian Regional Cinema: Transtextuality, Gender and Violence in Bullying maldito, la historia de María Marimacha Emilio Bustamante Creativity and Perseverance in a Precarious Context: Filmmaking in Ayacucho Between Artistic Vision and Lived Reality Martha-Cecilia Dietrich Filming Horror in Post-conflict Peru: Making and Marketing La casa rosada María Eugenia Ulfe

65

85

103

Art Film for Festival Circuits 7

8

9

10

In Search of an Audience: Cinema of Northern Peru, the Case of Omar Forero Sarah Barrow

121

Wiñaypacha by Oscar Catacora: Overcoming Indigenismo Through Intimacy and Slowness Maria Chiara D’Argenio

143

The Promise of Authenticity: Doing and Undoing the Cinematic Tourist Gaze in Claudia Llosa’s Short Films Daniella Wurst Local Grounding, Transnational Reach: The Films of Héctor Gálvez María Helena Rueda

161

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CONTENTS

11

The Peruvian Short Film: Styles and Treatments of Memory, Politics, and Violence Ricardo Bedoya

12

The Political Blockages of Peruvian Memory Cinema Alexandra Hibbett

13

Historical Memory and Cinematic Adaptations: Three Films Based on the Novels of Alonso Cueto Javier Protzel

14

Do Executioners Have Souls? La última tarde and La hora final: Representations of the “Insurgent” Character in Peruvian Fiction Cinema Karen Bernedo

PART II

15

16

17

ix

199

217

237

257

OUTSIDE THE DYNAMICS OF THE MARKET

No Concessions: Aesthetics and Politics in the Cinema of Eduardo Quispe Alarcón Cynthia Vich

279

“Toward a Cinema for Life”: The Activism of the Escuela de Cine Amazónico Claudia Arteaga

303

Bursting Lima’s Film Bubble: Women in the Contemporary Nonfiction Filmic Scene in Peru Isabel Seguí

321

Epilogue

343

Index

347

Notes on Contributors

Claudia Arteaga is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Scripps College. She specializes in Amazonian and Andean cinema and cultures. Her book project El documental independiente peruano en tiempos neoliberales (Peruvian Independent Documentary Film in Neoliberal Times) focuses on current developments in documentary film in Perú. In particular, it analyzes the ways in which filmmakers and producers—through collaborative practices and alternative distribution circuits—have elaborated cultural and epistemological responses to the current neoliberal era. She has published several articles in academic journals and released her first documentary film in 2019, Amahuaca. Construyendo territorio, made in collaboration with the Amahuaca people of the Peruvian Amazon. Sarah Barrow is Professor of Film and Media at the University of East Anglia. Her research on the relationships between cinema, state, and society in Peru has been published widely in journals and edited volumes. Her work includes studies of Lima’s film festival and production ecologies, on the work of producer Enid “Pinky” Campos, and on films made by Marianne Eyde, Francisco Lombardi, Claudia Llosa, Alvaro Velarde, Rosario García-Montero, and Josué Méndez. Her monograph, Contemporary Peruvian Cinema: History, Identity, Violence (IB Tauris, 2018), which explored the relationship between cinema and responses to the Shining Path crisis, won a Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award in 2019.

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Ricardo Bedoya has degrees in Law and Visual Anthropology. He has been a film critic since 1973 for the magazine Hablemos de Cine, as well as for La gran ilusión (editor) and El Comercio. Since 2000, he has directed the TV film program El Placer de los ojos. He runs the blog Páginas del diario de satán. He is Professor at the Communications School of Universidad de Lima and has published 100 años de cine en el Perú. Una historia crítica (1992); Un cine reencontrado. Diccionario ilustrado de las películas peruanas (1997); Entre fauces y colmillos (1999); Ojos bien abiertos: el lenguaje de las imágenes en movimiento (with Isaac León, 2001); El cine peruano en tiempos digitales (2015); and El Perú imaginado (2017). Karen Bernedo is founding member of the award-winning peripatetic Museum of Art and Memory. She has directed documentaries on memory of the Peruvian armed conflict such as Ludy D, mujeres en el conflicto armado interno; Mamaquilla, los hilos (des)bordados de la guerra; and Las otras memorias, arte y violencia política en el Perú. She has curated visual arts projects such as María Elena Moyano, textos de una mujer de izquierda (2017) Carpeta Colaborativa de Resistencia Visual 1992– 2017 (1992–2017) and Las Primeras, mujeres al encuentro de la historia (2018). She is completing the documentary Accomarca vive, coreografía de una matanza, which explores representations of the conflict in the carnivals of Ayacucho. Emilio Bustamante is Professor at the Department of Communication at the Universidad de Lima and the Department of Arts and Communication at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. He has been a television and cinema scriptwriter, co-authoring the script for Guamán Poma, winner of the competition for feature projects of the National Cinema Council of Peru (1996), and is a film critic in several media outlets. In 2012, he published La radio en el Perú. In 2017, he co-authored with Jaime Luna Victoria Las miradas múltiples: el cine regional peruano, which received the Research Recognition Award from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Maria Chiara D’Argenio is Teaching Fellow in Hispanic Studies at University College London. Her research focuses on Latin American cinema, illustrated magazines and visual culture, with a regional focus on Peru. Her latest publications include a special issue edition of Revista Iberoamericana on “Visuality, Modernity and Print Culture in

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Latin America” (1880–1950) and “Decolonial Encounters in Ciro Guerra’s El abrazo de la serpiente: Indigeneity, Coevalness and Intercultural Dialogue,” in Postcolonial Studies (2018). She is currently writing the monograph Indigenous Representation in 21st-century Latin American Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan) and co-editing the volume New Directions in Periodical Studies in Latin America. Martha-Cecilia Dietrich is a Social Anthropologist and Filmmaker. She currently holds a position as Assistant Professor at the University of Amsterdam. Her research focuses on the politics of remembering violent conflicts, memory activism, and human and environmental rights in Latin America, particularly Peru, Venezuela and, more recently, Ecuador. As part of her research activities, she made several award-winning documentary films which have been screened at film festivals worldwide. Alexandra Hibbett is Associate Professor at the Humanities Department of the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. She completed her Ph.D. at Birkbeck, University of London in 2013 and holds a Master’s degree from the University of Oxford (2009). Her main teaching and research interests are contemporary Peruvian literature and culture, critical theory, and the politics of art. Co-author of Contra el sueño de los justos: la literatura peruana ante la violencia política (2009) and co-editor of Dando cuenta: estudios sobre el testimonio de la violencia política en el Perú (1980–2000), she has also published chapters and articles on Peruvian cultural memory, and on José María Arguedas. Jeffrey Middents is Associate Professor in the Department of Literature at the School of Arts and Sciences at American University. His book, Writing National Cinema: Film Journals and Film Culture in Peru (2009), investigates the historical place of cultural writing within a national discourse. He has also published essays on documentary aesthetics in the work of Patricio Guzmán, Luis Llosa’s films made under producer Roger Corman, the sense of place in contemporary Latin American cinema, and the iconic nature of indigenous characters in Peru and Mexico. He is completing a monograph on transnational auteurism and the work of Alfonso Cuarón. Javier Protzel is Professor of Contemporary Social Thought at Universidad del Pacífico (Lima, Peru). He earned his Ph.D. in Sociology at the

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EHESS, Paris, France. He contributed to film studies with his book Imaginarios sociales e imaginarios cinematográficos (2009), among other publications. He is the author of Espacio-tiempo y movilidad. Narrativas del viaje y la lejanía (2014), Lima imaginada (2010), and Procesos Interculturales (2006). He was Chairman of CONACINE, the National Film Board of Peru (2002–2006) and Vice-President for Latin America of the World Communication Association (2011–2017). María Helena Rueda is Associate Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at Smith College. Her book La violencia y sus huellas: una mirada desde la narrativa colombiana (2011), analyzes the treatment of violence in Colombian literature since the 1920s. She is also the co-editor of Meanings of Violence in Contemporary Latin America (2011), which addresses the proliferation of increasingly complex forms of violence in the region, and the representation of such violence. She has published various articles and chapters on film and literature in contemporary Latin America. Her current research focuses on how cinema deals with the legacies of repressive regimes and civil wars in present-day Latin America, particularly in Chile, Peru, and Colombia. Isabel Seguí is a feminist film historian specializing in the politics and practices of Peruvian and Bolivian women’s filmmaking. In 2019, she completed her Ph.D. at the University of St Andrews (Scotland), and, in 2020, was granted a three-year Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship to develop the project ‘Women’s Nonfiction Filmmaking in Peru (19702020)’ at the University of Edinburgh. Her research has been published in various journals in Europe and the Americas, and awarded by the British Association of Film, Television, and Screen Studies. She co-organized the first two editions of the Latin American Women’s Filmmaking International Conference (London 2017, and Madrid 2019) and facilitates the research network ‘Mujeres en el Cine Latinoamericano’. Carolina Sitnisky is an independent scholar with extensive work experience in entertainment. She taught at the University of California, the University of Southern California, and Pomona College. Her research focuses on connections between cultural politics and historical readings in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latin American cinema and literature, with emphasis on the Andean region. She is the co-editor with Constanza Burucúa of the volume The Precarious in the Cinemas of the

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

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Americas (2018) and with Gabriela Copertari, El estado de las cosas: cine latinoamericano del nuevo milenio (2015). María Eugenia Ulfe is currently Senior Professor/Lecturer in Anthropology at the Department of Social Sciences and Director of the M.A. Programs in Anthropology and Visual Anthropology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. She also directs the Interdisciplinary Research Group on Memory and Democracy. Her research focuses on memory, creative culture, violence, and visual anthropology. Her publications include Cajones de la memoria: la historia reciente del Perú en los retablos andinos (PUCP, 2011) and ¿Y después de la violencia qué queda? Víctimas, ciudadanos y reparaciones en el contexto post-CVR en el Perú (CLACSO, 2013). Cynthia Vich is Associate Professor of Latin American Literature and Cinema at Fordham University in New York City. She is the author of Indigenismo de vanguardia en el Perú: un estudio sobre el “Boletín Titikaka” (2000) as well as of articles on Peruvian indigenista writers, Salazar Bondy’s Lima la horrible, and Daniel Alarcón’s Ciudad de payasos. Her most recent publications discuss the cinematic representations of urban spatiality in the films La teta asustada, Paraíso and Magallanes. She is currently expanding further upon this topic in a book project about Lima on screen, where she discusses other recent Peruvian films such as El limpiador, Octubre, Rosa Chumbe, and A punto de despegar. Daniella Wurst is an independent scholar. She holds a Ph.D. in Latin American and Iberian Cultures from Columbia University. Her research is focused on the intersections between aesthetics, memory practices, and temporality. She is currently preparing her book Breaking the Frames of the Past: Photography and Literature in Contemporary Latin America.

List of Figures

Fig. 3.1

Fig. 3.2

Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2

Fig. 5.1

Fig. 5.2 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2 Fig. 9.1 Fig. 9.2

End credits of ¡Asu Mare! (Ricardo Maldonado 2013), featuring Carlos Alcántara doing stand-up and the Marca Perú logo across the bottom of the screen Carlos Alcántara offers a doughnut to an American police officer in Ricardo Maldonado’s internet short Peru, Nebraska (2011) Maria’s menstruation in the river recalls a similar image in Carrie (De Palma 1976) This image recalls the testimonies from women who were raped by masked soldiers during the internal armed conflict Filming La maldición del Inca (Berrocal and Ccorahua unreleased)—crew with Carlitos (camera centre), Lucho and Martin (from centre to right) Film still from La maldición del Inca (Berrocal and Ccorahua unreleased) featuring the powerful Inca Film poster for La casa rosada (Ortega Matute 2017) The children line up each day before their lessons start in Chicama (Forero 2012) The district attorney Bardales makes his case Video still Niño Pepita flotando (Llosa 2010) Businessman encounters his (younger) self in the year 2032 in Recordarás Perú (Llosa 2012)

49

56 75

80

88 97 105 129 133 168 173

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 15.1

Fig. 15.2 Fig. 17.1 Fig. 17.2

Protagonist couple of 1 (Quispe Alarcón 2008) having an awkward silence during their conversation in front of the Centro Cívico building, in Lima’s downtown Reverse shot of the camera while filming 6 (Quispe Alarcón 2016) Frame of A punto de despegar (Best 2015) Film poster for A punto de despegar (Best 2015)

289 291 333 335

CHAPTER 1

Introduction Cynthia Vich and Sarah Barrow

What is it that makes Peruvian cinema of the twenty-first century distinctive and why is it worth exploring? Historically, Peru has not been renowned for its cinematic strength, and many still argue that its filmic ecosystem lacks a coherent infrastructure. Nevertheless, Peruvian cinema has recently experienced significant shifts that respond to, reflect, and in many ways challenge what is happening within its broader societal landscape. Key national scholars and critics (and contributors to this collection) Ricardo Bedoya (2015, p. 73) and Emilio Bustamante (Bustamante and Luna Victoria, 2017, p. 17) have written that whereas throughout the twentieth-century, Peruvian cinema was mostly produced and seen in Lima, the first two decades of the twenty-first century have decentered film production and spectatorship toward the rest of the country to become more genuinely national.1 Moreover,

C. Vich (B) Fordham University, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] S. Barrow University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 C. Vich and S. Barrow (eds.), Peruvian Cinema of the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52512-5_1

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C. VICH AND S. BARROW

many Peruvian films are achieving global visibility on the festival and art cinema circuits as well as via online platforms, such that the concept of Peruvian cinema has become part of a broader conversation within the field of Latin American film studies to do with interdisciplinarity and transnationality. In the context of film production, Peruvian directors such as Claudia Llosa, Melina León, and Alvaro Delgado Aparicio have become increasingly visible on the global stage. Furthermore, as evidence that this dynamism is not restricted to market-oriented products and processes, regional, community-based, and experimental filmmaking has significantly expanded within the last twenty years with directors like Palito Ortega Matute, Eduardo Quispe Alarcón, and Lorena Best challenging and expanding traditional cinematic practices. In sharp contrast with the state of the field only a couple of decades ago, nowadays Peruvian cinema is marked by its ample diversity. This book, the first English-language collection of essays on Peruvian cinema, takes as its starting point the growth of cinematic production in the country during the first two decades of the twenty-first century. We wish to tie this significant upsurge to the conclusion of the twenty-year war (1980–2000) between the state and the insurgent group Sendero Luminoso [Shining Path], which gave way to the reinvention of the country within a neoliberal agenda and deliberately and prominently inserted Peru into the global marketplace. This process included changes across the whole landscape of Peruvian society—economic, political, cultural, and technological. Economically, a significant rise in the number of people who belong to the middle classes occurred, with the poverty rate falling from 52.2% in 2005 to 26.1% in 2013.2 During the century’s first decade, what has been called the “Peruvian miracle” refers to an extraordinary economic performance which displayed an annual growth of 6.1% of its GDP between 2003 and 2013, a period then followed by a slowdown to an annual average rate of 3.2% between 2014 and 2018, mainly as a result of the lowering of international commodity prices. Nevertheless, even the unprecedented macroeconomic surge, especially during the first decade, was in many ways divorced from the general welfare of Peruvians at the micro level of everyday life, and was also accompanied by one of neoliberalism’s systemic features: the persistence of high levels of inequality. In addition, the vulnerabiity and fragility of the emerging middle classes has been made dramatically evident in the economic crisis resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, which has also revealed that, in spite of solid economic reserves, urgently needed investment in key sectors like health was scandalously neglected.

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INTRODUCTION

3

Politically, in the late twentieth century, the return to democracy which began in a highly precarious way with the elections of 19803 and was then interrupted by Alberto Fujimori’s dissolution of Congress in 1992, was reconfirmed in 2000 with the transitional government of Valentín Paniagua (2000–2001), followed by the election of Alejandro Toledo (2001–2006). Democratically elected governments have continued ever since (Alan García 2006–2011; Ollanta Humala 2011–2016; Pedro Pablo Kuczynski 2016–2018),4 although corruption and criminality among elected officials have been an endemic dysfunction throughout this period, undermining the effectiveness and the meaning of democracy in the country. The fact that every single president elected since 2000 has been subject to criminal investigations or actual charges for massive corruption schemes is only one of the many faces of a highly chaotic political scenario. In the last twenty years, Peru’s systemic political precariousness and institutional weaknesses have also been fed by a debilitating lack of solid political parties, by politicians who fail to represent and respond to popular demands, and by a postpolitical cynicism which views successful economic performance at the macro level as the sole recipe for national development. In relation to this, unremitting political instability has resulted from the national economy’s acute dependence on the demands of the mining industries. In this respect, the management of local resources has been the source of persistent political conflict between indigenous and locally organized groups and foreign conglomerates backed by the state. A further example of how massive corruption has eroded the most basic levels of political stability is evidenced by further significant upheavals within the government sphere. In March 2018, Peru’s then president (Pedro Pablo Kuczynski) resigned when secret deals between his party and politicians from the opposition were discovered in an attempt to avert a Congress-led motion for presidential vacancy. Martín Vizcarra, the second vice president, was then sworn into power for the remainder of the presidential period, that is, until 2021. Vizcarra’s projects of political reform, aimed at attacking corruption and strengthening the country’s institutions, faced extraordinary levels of obstruction from Congress in spite of being supported by 85% of the population. As a result, in September 2019 Vizcarra dissolved Congress and called for new elections for short term legislators which were held in January 2020. In addition, further accusations of corruption resulted in a failed attempt by the newly elected Congress to oust Vizcarra in September 2020. On the sociocultural and technological fronts, since the beginning of the new century, continuing urbanization and greater access to digital

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C. VICH AND S. BARROW

infrastructure in remote parts of the country have resulted in both an increased westernization of perspectives and a greater visibility of cultural production from different parts of the country. Nevertheless, tensions clearly remain about the balance of power and agency between the different groups that constitute the Peruvian nation, and the centralization of Peruvian culture around Lima continues to be an obstacle. On the one hand, small steps have been taken toward a more inclusive sense of national pride that encompasses greater symbolic acknowledgement of non-white identities and recognition of Peru’s diverse cultural heritage. On the other, Marca Perú, a broad government-sponsored nation-branding project that is discussed in one of the chapters in this collection, has become the hegemonic focus of discussion about the national, and operates as a technology of subjectivation stemming from late capitalism’s market logics (Cánepa Koch and Lossio Chávez 2019, pp. 17, 20). As a call to a renewed form of citizenship centered on emphasizing personal and national achievement as the opportunity to rebuild the country’s reputation both internally and on a global scale, Marca Perú has established itself as a public and moral project of “entrepreneurial epic” that governs many aspects of the lives of Peruvians (2019, p. 26). Following the logic of branding, Marca Perú has recuperated and channelled diversity, but it has also aestheticized and monetized it, limiting its possibilities of fostering a deep and significant transformation toward a more democratic society (2019, p. 29). As far as technological advancement is concerned, the complex connectivity and “global-spatial proximity” (Tomlinson 1999, p. 3) between Peruvians and the outside world (through the widespread use of cell phones and the internet) has had an enormous effect on the way Peruvians conduct and define their lives both personally and professionally. As Kapur and Wagner have argued, referring to the global dimensions of the technological revolution, the “new technologies of communication have served as the glue and conduit of neoliberalism,” that is to say, the medium through which neoliberalism embeds itself into our everyday lives (2011, p. 1). Certainly, this has been the experience for a large number of Peruvians for whom the persistent cultural distances have been, to a certain extent, disrupted, blurred, and complicated by technology.

Neoliberalism in Peru In our desire to contextualize twenty-first-century Peruvian cinema within the transformations brought about by neoliberalism, we acknowledge that

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since the 1990s, Peru has been one of the several Latin American sites of experimentation for neoliberal reforms propelled “from above” (Gago 2017, p. 2). However, as Gago has pointed out, Foucault’s concept of governmentality allows us to understand neoliberalism as a set of skills, technologies, and practices which reveal a rationality that cannot be thought of only from above, but need to be considered as also coming from below (2017, p. 2). As “a variety of ways of doing, being and thinking that organize the social machinery’s calculations and effects,” the way that neoliberalism has unfolded in Peru provides quite a concrete example of how this rationality “is not purely abstract nor macropolitical but rather arises from the encounter with forces at work and is embodied in various ways by the subjectivities and tactics of everyday life” (Gago 2017, p. 2). In that sense, beyond its political implementation by the government, the ways in which neoliberalism has become rooted in popular subjectivities in places like Peru attests to a complex, immanent, and nonlinear functioning where it is “simultaneously contemporary and contested, reinterpreted and innovated” as well as “appropriated, destroyed, relaunched, and altered by those who, it assumes, are only its victims” (Gago 2017, p. 234). As an example of the multiple ways through which neoliberal technologies of power operate, the ideology of entrepreneurship normalized in the country at the macro and micro levels since 1990 presents itself as an opportunity for everyone, reinforcing what since the early twentieth century has been a heroic narrative that understands migration as the first path for economic prosperity. As a “vitalist pragmatic,” the social, cultural, and economic transformations brought by migration can then be understood as one of the ways in which neoliberalism from below reveals itself as “a powerful popular economy that combines community skills of self-management and intimate know-how as a technology of mass self-entrepreneurship” (Gago 2017, p. 6). In Peru, the intense process of urbanization that has continued into the twenty-first century has resulted in a sprawling growth of cities, mostly along the coast but also elsewhere throughout the country, where the emblematic mall-plus-multiplex phenomenon has become the familiar site of an urban consumer culture shaped by the neoliberal expectations and specific habits of the growing middle classes. Indeed, as García Canclini pointed out back in 1995, since the early 1990s citizenship and the act of political participation in Latin America became reconfigured by the practices of consumption. With a degree of agency that operates mainly at the level of affect, the overriding

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precariousness of Peruvian consumption-born feelings of citizenship feeds into an unregulated and thriving economy that relies on the logic of competition and individualism, counteracting a lack of formal employment with an abundance of small, mostly family-owned, independent local businesses. In this overarching context, small scale entrepreneurship coexists with a globally connected private sector which is the dominant structure of power at the expense of the persistent erosion of the role of the state and its institutions. As a rationality grounded on an economic model, neoliberalism in Peru has been presented as a remedy for recovery after twenty years of conflict characterized by massive inflation and widespread political violence. During those years, the state proved to be completely ineffective in terms of safeguarding its people and controlling the economy, destroying citizens’ confidence in its capacity to govern. This distrust created the perfect grounds for neoliberal rationality to substitute the state with an almost fundamentalist belief in the power of the market and the private sphere to improve the conditions of society. The emphasis in this marketized environment has thus been on consumerism, on attracting global investment, and on creating a celebratory mood which strives to present a positive image of Peru to the outside world through achievements in culture, sports, and especially, gastronomy (Cánepa Koch and Lossio Chávez 2019, p. 27). These have become antidotes for the processes of memory and reconciliation that are urgently needed if Peruvian society is to rebuild and avoid perpetuating the same historic divisions that triggered the conflict. Given that culture is, after war, the second most important sector in the neoliberal economy (Kapur and Wagner 2011, p. 1), we should then acknowledge that cinema as a set of cultural relations is more effective than economic reports as a tool to examine the impact of neoliberalism as a new phase of capitalism operating in Peruvian society. Taking as a starting point the contradictory nature of cinema as both a product of capitalism and an art form that can resist and reimagine it through specific content and formal structures, cinema both participates in and contests the neoliberal project (Kapur and Wagner 2011, p. 3; Sandberg 2018, p. 3). Indeed, one of our goals here has been to showcase films that, highlighting the wide spectrum of contemporary experience, lie at opposite ends of the ideological positioning toward the realities of the Peruvian nation as reinvented through neoliberalism. Filmmaking practices that in some aspects place themselves against capitalist rationality such as those of Eduardo Quispe Alarcón, Lorena Best and the Escuela de Cine Amazónico, are featured in this volume alongside mass

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entertainment productions like those by Ricardo Maldonado and Frank Pérez-Garland, linked with corporations such as Marca Perú and Tondero. The end of the second decade of the new century provides a fruitful opportunity to highlight the parallel developments between cinema and society in Peru during this period. We believe that dynamism (in terms of outburst in productivity) and instability (in terms of the fragility and precarity of the infrastructure for cinema in the country) are the most prominent features that link both spheres.5 The close relationship between cinema and the neoliberal economy in particular is highlighted through shared patterns of heightened productivity and success, always haunted by a structural vulnerability and volatility that threaten to undermine any optimistic predictions for long term prosperity.6 Peru’s economic successes in the midst of its political instability during this period are in sync with the relatively high output of a national cinema that is nevertheless constrained by a fragile infrastructure that makes its future look very uncertain.

Cinema Regulation Within the cinematic milieu, the structural forces underlying the tension between dynamism and instability arise in large part from the repeated attempts at creating an overarching legal framework. The nation’s film legislation (Ley de la Cinematografía Peruana 26370), in place from 1994 until December 2019, had already proven obsolete given that it was created before the impact of the digital revolution on all aspects of film production, distribution, exhibition, and culture. After many years of heated debate, a controversial proposal for new legislation (Proyecto de Ley 3304/2018) was drafted and presented to Congress in early 2019, resulting in preliminary approval, but its progress was then stalled due to the dissolution of Congress in September of that year. Unexpectedly, and without public discussion, President Martín Vizcarra issued an emergency decree (Decreto de Urgencia 022-2019) in December 2019 which—at the time of publication—still needed approval by the new Congress that was reinstated in March 2020.7 This situation further underlines our hypothesis that in Peru, the relationship between political, economic,and cinematic developments is inextricable. The most notable strength of the new cinema decree is the tripling of the funding available for film, between thirty and forty percent of which has now been ring-fenced exclusively for regional productions.8

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This signals a crucial further step toward the decentralization of Peruvian cinema, which we believe will make it more genuinely representative of the nation. The stability from knowing there is a defined budget for film production could also result in more formalized structures overall. However, while this decree was being debated as a project in Congress, it generated controversy where many criticisms were highlighted. Among these, there remained concerns that the structure of competition and decision-making about the allocation of the funding awards is still to be linked to the political will of the government in power. Moreover, one of the most problematic issues expressed by local film critics has been the law’s failure to include any measure that would “complete the cycle of cinematic production” (Delgado 2019). By this, we refer to the lack of any concrete steps to ensure that Peruvian films have dignified access to local commercial screens (Bedoya 2019). Local filmmakers currently face an overarching precarity with regard to unpredictable scheduling, poor information-sharing, non-existent formal publicity, and systematic exclusion from processes relating to the distribution and exhibition of their work. From our perspective, one of the new law’s greatest weaknesses is that it does very little to address the persistent issue of lack of opportunities for women in all areas of cinematic activity. For much too long, Peruvian cinema has been little more than a closed club that privileges men, and for this to change, bolder measures should be implemented at the institutional level. In addition, the new legislation suffers from the institutional fragility of its governing body, the Ministerio de Cultura, whose inefficiency has been notorious due to its debilitating instability caused in part by the constant changes in its leadership (for example, at least thirteen different Ministers in the last ten years). As has been pointed out by Wiener (2020), the decree also highly benefits the commercial sector, failing to make any statements related to screen quotas and tying funding to box office success. Finally, we note that no guidelines are provided to reduce the damaging effects of systematic informality when hiring cast and crew members. Several commitments to important initiatives are mentioned in the decree, among them the need: to provide audiovisual literacy instruction in schools; to offer professional training in different areas of audiovisual craft; to support Peruvian cinema internationally; and to promote alternative exhibition venues and indigenous cinema. The problem is that

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no detail is given as to how these will be implemented or resourced. No mention is made of plans for the creation of a much needed public film school. A reference is made acknowledging the importance of the existing national film archive, but no solid plan is given for the creation of a proper cinemateca that would have a more wide-ranging remit to conserve and give generalized access to Peruvian cinema. We believe a new approach to implementation and resourcing is urgently required to address the historical situation of powerlessness that has left Peruvian filmmakers unprotected and at the mercy of the unpredictable forces of the market. A truly all-embracing legal framework is vital to embolden and empower those whose work advances film as an art form rather than as a commercial product. Despite the proposed regulatory system, many Peruvian filmmakers remain reliant on external funding in a way that is similar to the economy’s strong dependence on foreign investment. As part of the neoliberal paradigm, these external funding sources encourage fierce competition while at the same time emphasize age-old representational demands on Peruvian filmmakers. This burden of representation, which could be seen as “veiled neocolonialist pressure” (Rueda 2020) or as “neoliberal forms of censorship” (Sandberg 2018, p. 10) dictates what a film should look like, influencing themes and aesthetics, and facilitating “cliched and exoticized views of Latin American landscapes, cultures and people” (Sandberg 2018, p. 10). Despite these pressures, many Peruvian filmmakers have managed to preserve their cultural and artistic integrity while at the same time participating in global festival circuits. Some have also achieved this through finding alternative representational forms and by creating informal distribution networks and exhibition platforms.

Revisiting the National Within a worldwide environment of transnational practices which disrupt borders in all aspects of film culture, the debate about whether it is still appropriate to think in terms of a national paradigm for cinema continues to resurface. While acknowledging that “the concept of national cinema is more an aspiration than a reality” (Poblete 2018, p. 18) and has been a much debated topic in metropolitan film studies, we also recognize that cinematic culture continues to play an important role in the creation of nations as “imagined political communit[ies]” (Anderson 1983, p. 6), helping to shape “shared memories of a constructed past” (Hayward in Hjort and Mackenzie 2000, p. 90). However, rather than seeking out

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images of coherence and consensus, national cinema increasingly responds to the diversity of experiences that exist within any single nation. Still, as Poblete argues citing Rosen, national cinema is “always the result of a theoretical effort, positing it as a relatively unifying object, even when the goal is showcasing its complexity” (2018, p. 21). Indeed, despite the acknowledged degree of artificiality of the concept, this book nevertheless takes national cinema as an important framing device that allows us to connect a specific cultural object such as cinema with particular developments in Peruvian society at a moment when the diversity of Peruvian identity, at least discursively, is in the process of acquiring greater social, cultural, economic, and political value. Through the curation of this volume, we want to make visible not only that the decentralization of Peruvian cinema is the most distinctive phenomenon of the period, but also that film from Peru has diversified into a wide range of cinematic practices and products. This diversification has allowed for a more varied appreciation of the many subjectivities that co-exist across the boundaries of what is generally understood as Peru. In that spirit, we wish to point out the importance of sub-national dynamics, including those of indigenous cultures and languages, that are increasingly visible in Peruvian cinema today. Throughout its history, the biggest challenge for Peruvian cinema has been securing a national audience. In that sense, following Poblete’s understanding of audiences within given countries “as interpretive communities based on shared practices of reception, cultural competencies, and vernacular sensibilities” (2018, p. 17), we believe that one of the main obstacles faced by Peruvians is their sense of appreciation for cinema as a legitimate form of cultural expression. Overarchingly, cinema reception in Peru is mostly understood as a form of entertainment. Echoing Poblete’s general affirmation about the Latin American context, Peruvian national film is similar in that it has never enjoyed “the benefits of the formal and systematic cultural inculcation nor the training in [national] ways of reading or seeing that school provided for literary texts” (2018, p. 18). In other words, in general, the Peruvian education system still gives the sense that literature is the place where the national imaginary is formed; and so Peruvian cinema, in common with others across the continent, has not enjoyed thorough instruction at schools or universities. This has limited the sociopolitical impact of cinema, since films that question and criticize different aspects of Peruvian society are mostly seen by a small, educated elite. Furthermore, because of the expensive nature of film

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production (something that has recently been partly reversed by new and cheaper technologies), producing cinema has been limited to members of that same elite, with their work often criticized for not resonating with audiences of different social backgrounds. Since this has slowly been changing in the last twenty years, our selection of films aims to highlight some of the range of new voices that are coming through from different cultural, gender, and socio-economic identities. From the perspective of reception, this has triggered a degree of audience expansion which is evident through the alternative spaces for film-viewing that have developed throughout the country in recent years. Small, producer-led festivals (such as the Festival de Cine Hecho por Mujeres , the Transcinema Festival Internacional de Cine, the Festival de Cine de Trujillo (FECIT) and the Festival de Cine Peruano en Lenguas Originarias ), as well as cineclubs and independent showcases led by film critics (such as the former Cine Club de la Universidad de Ciencias y Humanidades , El Galpón Transcinema in Lima, and the Cine Club Amaru in Ayacucho) have been crucial in reaching out to wider spectatorships. In addition, initiatives such as the Grupo Chaski’s Microcines project, the work of Docuperú, and the proliferation of online platforms such as Cineaparte, have given opportunities for many more people to experience film culture beyond the space of the multiplex theater. While these alternative exhibition spaces work tirelessly to enhance the appreciation of Peruvian and international cinema by local audiences, and to bridge the gap between critically engaged and artistically sophisticated films and the general public, the fact remains that the exclusion of most national art and independent films from reasonable access to mainstream theaters continues to perpetuate the marginalization of Peruvian cinema as a legitimate site for national identification and sense of belonging.

A Diverse Cinematic Landscape Because we wish to emphasize that the growth of Peruvian cinematic production in the first two decades of the twenty-first century is closely linked to Peru’s insertion into the neoliberal model, the relationship of film production and intended audiences with market dynamics has been the guiding principle for the decisions we have made about the categorization of the films discussed in this collection. Consequently, the first distinction we wish to make is between those films which have embraced market logics, functioning as commodities both in the commercial and

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in the art markets, and those that have not had this imperative as their primary objective. Informed by the elasticity, porosity, and the different levels of precariousness that characterize the Peruvian filmmaking milieu, our aim is not to provide a rigid taxonomy, but a useful and ample set of tools to address the complex functioning of the nation’s current filmmaking and consumption. We believe that despite the problematics of any categorization, it is productive to think about how cinema aligns with but also transcends clear-cut boundaries, and to acknowledge there are slippages between categories. These happen when the originality of hybrid forms disrupts intended classifications and reveals new perspectives despite the tendency of market logics to label products in a way that orients them toward specific audiences. For this reason, rather than understanding our categories as fixed, we want to use them as a strategic approach that recognizes that several of the films discussed in this volume could easily be placed in more than one group.

Part I: The Market Dynamics of Peruvian Cinema Within our first overarching category we have identified three broad sections. All of the films in these sections have a common objective of achieving success, whether profit in the commercial market or prestige in the film festival and art cinema circuits. We have adopted this framework that privileges the way the films attract an audience and attain visibility because despite the variety of this first category, their primary intention is to be recognized within some kind of market context. Furthermore, the division of this first general category into three sections arises in part from the different production structures of the films, their means of circulation and exhibition, and the primary audiences for which they have been produced. We have named the first section within this category of market-oriented films “Big budget production for local entertainment.” This group of essays comprises critical approaches to films produced by national companies whose main objective is to develop for-profit entertainment cinema, and whose audiences are centered in Lima and other major cities in Peru. These films do not yet demonstrate the existence or viability of a film industry given that there are very few and relatively new major production companies (such as Tondero and Big Bang Films ), whose products remain fairly limited in scope. However, the central role of the production company as author, together with the emphasis on profit, private finance,

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and genre, signal in that direction. The new habits and tastes of emerging consumers of these films have resulted in a considerable rise in attendance at mall-based multiplexes as part of a broader entertainment experience (Bedoya 2015, pp. 26–27). By adopting some of the most classic thematic approaches of the commercial industry system (such as depoliticization, historical simplification, romantic storylines, recognizable casting, and predictable content), these films emulate those produced by Hollywood majors (Ortner in Castro 2017, p. 20). In terms of distribution, these projects are linked at an early stage of production to a distributor, usually a representative of a Hollywood firm for Peru, who guarantees that they will receive a similar treatment to that enjoyed by Hollywood films in local theaters. Essentially, this entails screenings in accessible and well-equipped theaters at popular times, and payment directly to the producer (Bedoya 2015, p. 69). This relatively sophisticated and more robust distribution infrastructure has obvious positive effects on achieving high audience numbers and greater visibility for these films as compared with the other types discussed in this book. The first chapter in this section, by Carolina Sitnisky, takes the romantic comedy genre as a strategy for commercial success and analyzes four films by Frank Pérez-Garland. Within the bounds of film as entertainment, she argues for the substantial advances that this genre has made toward developing a national audience by establishing an affective connection with the spectators grounded in nostalgia and locally recognizable features. Jeffrey Middents continues the discussion on nostalgia in relation to audience development with his chapter on the relationship between ¡Asu Mare! (2013), Peru’s biggest commercial filmic success with three million spectators, and the nation branding campaign Marca Perú. Concerned with the internal and external framing of Peru on screen, Middents discusses Peruvian national cinema’s historical neglect of the comedy genre and emphasizes how ¡Asu Mare! fulfills some of the goals of Marca Perú: to brand the country by identifying its competitive identity in the global market, and to provide an example, through its protagonist, of how to be a twenty-first-century Peruvian. The second section, “Regional low budget drama,” presents analyses of films made by individual directors as part of small independent production companies whose films are shown mostly in local venues outside Lima and where profit, albeit low, is one of the main guiding forces. Regional film in general has been acknowledged as the most significant development in Peruvian cinema since the late 1990s (Bustamante and Luna Victoria 2017, p. 17; Bustamante 2018, p. 443) and in this section we

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focus on those regional films with a specific eye on commercial success and a local audience. These mainly profit-oriented films have been part of a wider phenomenon of video production that Alfaro has named “Peruwood,” comparable to similar developments in Hong Kong and China, in India (Bollywood) and Nigeria (Nollywood) (2013, p. 72). Alfaro further notes that more accessible DVD technology has facilitated the development of a new market with content that until recently had been marginalized from the audiovisual industry in Peru (2013, p. 71). This technological shift has contributed to a decentering of how and by whom Peruvian cinema is now produced and perceived. In general, regional filmmaking, which relies on informal, self-financed, and artisanal arrangements, has thrived during recent decades; this collection aims to make that informality more visible and to acknowledge its value. Writing specifically about the distinctive features of regional cinema, Bustamante and Luna Victoria have emphasized that these films have introduced new subjectivities, scenarios, cultural practices, and experiences that were previously absent from Peruvian screens (2017, p. 25). As has been further noted by these scholars (2017, pp. 34–40), the specific production context of these films tends to be characterized by directors who operate as small entrepreneurs, often investing their own money and fighting against pirates who will produce several versions of the same film. Their financing strategies include holding acting workshops for which they charge a fee and at the same time cast their actors. They also save money by avoiding writing detailed scripts, filming during daytime over many months or even years depending on when money is available, and using personal computers with free-to-download editing software for post-production. Sometimes they apply for and secure government funds, but this is still rarely the main source of funding. Exhibition for these films is largely itinerant. Bustamante and Luna Victoria (2017, pp. 43–50) explain that each director often personally travels with the original copy in order to avoid piracy across cities and towns where films are shown. These tours usually last several months and so require the filmmaker to make a substantial economic investment (in cash and time), something that not all can afford. Films are screened in locations such as municipal halls, school auditoria, and even outdoors. Entry fees are charged, and although it is difficult to get a precise sense of audience numbers due to the relatively informal nature of the activity, they are thought to be extremely high, with some of the directors claiming to have reached several hundreds of thousands of spectators. What has made

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these large audience numbers possible is that until recently in regions such as Ayacucho, for example, there were no multiplexes. In the region of Puno, where the main city of Juliaca was once referred to as “the Hollywood of the Andes” (Bustamante 2016, n.p.), the production of this type of regional film declined after the multiplex opened. Among these commercially oriented regional dramas, the two most popular genres have been horror and melodrama. Especially in the case of Ayacuchean filmmakers, these films combine Hollywood conventions with content and narrative structures taken from oral Andean tradition. Thematically they are quite diverse, incorporating issues of power and agency, historical memory, and local societal norms and taboos, among others. Emilio Bustamante’s chapter analyzes the connections between the Ayacuchean film Bullying maldito, la historia de María Marimacha (2015) by Mélinton Eusebio, and American horror and B-series films. He provides an intriguing reading that also draws on extra-filmic sources, such as the poster and the Peruvian legend of María Marimacha, which were used in order to appeal to the local Ayacuchean audience. Through interweaving these and other transtextual connections, he presents a possible interpretation of the ambiguous return of the protagonist after her death at the end of the film. In her chapter on the making of La maldición del Inca (unreleased), Martha-Cecilia Dietrich reflects on the precarious conditions that have made it impossible for this film to be completed after its eighth year in production. She also discusses this film’s rewriting of history through its attempt to change the perception of Ayacucheans from being victims of history to becoming its heroes. In a region that was so brutally exposed to the violence of the armed conflict, and where a climate of disempowerment remains, the heroic figure of the film’s protagonist allows for the possibility of imagining a different contemporary reality. In Chapter 6, María Eugenia Ulfe adopts an anthropological perspective to explore the conditions, the modes of production, and the circulation of La casa rosada by Ayacuchean director Palito Ortega Matute. She uses the concept of “cultural intimacy” to analyze Ortega Matute’s highly artisanal and familial approach to filmmaking, which thus establishes a distinctive emotional connection with the local Ayacuchean audience, triggered by their own memories of the ways that the city experienced the conflict. The third section, “Art film for festival circuits,” operates within the specific niche market of international film festivals and their production and circulation contexts across national and regional borders. Due to the

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limited state support, this type of filmmaking has grown to depend on the festival ecology in multiple ways, benefitting from funding schemes that normally come from European sources with specific thematic and formal expectations. In common with other small cinemas around the globe, what speaks to the underlying fragility of contemporary Peruvian art cinema is the tension between the visibility garnered in the festival milieu and the difficulty in achieving recognition on the domestic front. Despite the prestige of festival awards, Peruvian art films have not generally succeeded in securing the trust of national exhibitors who are reluctant to offer them appropriate slots because they lack faith in these films’ capacity to appeal to local audiences beyond a small, educated middle-class section of the population. As a consequence, Peru has neither a systematic production context, nor a sustained national audience for its art cinema. But what is art cinema? The concept defies categorization by its very nature. Our understanding of it aligns with Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover’s approach, which emphasizes its hybridity, elasticity, and impurity (2010). Rather than focusing on a fixed set of specific characteristics, we propose that art film appeals to the tastes of a specialized international audience, has a commitment to high-quality production values, and displays a thematic translatability that crosses cultural frontiers and expands the exhibition networks allowing for greater economic return. As Thomas Elsaesser (2005) and Tamara Falicov (2013) have argued from a reception studies perspective, art cinema is that which “screens and succeeds in art cinemas” (quoted in Couret 2018, p. 241). Art films are often perceived as elitist in that they are intellectually and aesthetically challenging, and historically they have been the most prominent in academic scholarship. Still, following Nilo Couret, it is crucial to keep in mind that any criteria for conferring the status of art cinema changes over time and that, as a shifting discursive category, art cinema maps onto many context-specific geopolitical frameworks (2018, pp. 236– 237). Corresponding with the hegemonic neoliberalism of contemporary Peru, the nation’s art cinema has become a valued commodity as part of its participation in the film festival ecology. Thematically, in Peru as throughout Latin America, art film is mostly an “identity-based first-person cinema” (Lazzara 2016, p. 24 in Sandberg 2018, p. 13) focusing on smaller stories about single characters and everyday issues often located in private and family settings. In contrast with the politics of oblivion adopted by mainstream society in the specific post-conflict context of Peruvian neoliberalism, the subject of memory

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has become almost symbiotic with the very notion of art cinema in the country. This can clearly be seen in the number of contributions about this topic in this volume: Rueda on Paraíso and NN ; Bedoya on short films about memory and recent political conflicts; Bernedo on La última tarde and La hora final; Hibbett on La teta asustada, Paloma de papel , Volver a ver, and La casa rosada; and Protzel on Mariposa negra, La hora azul , and Magallanes . By focusing on the materiality of the situations presented in the films Paraíso and NN , Maria Helena Rueda’s chapter points out how the director opens up his films to global interpretations, without depriving them of their local contextual meaning and weight. Focusing on the agency of spaces and objects in both films, she analyzes how these concepts are integral to human interaction and to the resilience of the characters in their attempts to overcome what appear to be hopeless circumstances. Ricardo Bedoya’s chapter on recent short films presents a case study of five examples which deal with memory of the Peruvian armed conflict as well as with some of the political clashes of recent years between the state and local communities regarding mining activity. He highlights the importance of the short format in that it allows directors to showcase a certain trajectory in terms of market appeal and development of their aesthetic language. In her chapter, Alexandra Hibbett refers to the political blockages of Peruvian memory cinema, and uses the concept of duty-memory to reflect on film’s capacity to have an impact on general society. She identifies five blockages: the tension between film as industry or art; the difficulty of portraying Andean subjects with integrity; the attempt not to undermine the agency of victims in the process of representation; the highly centralized Peruvian film industry; and the risks of tackling the topic of political violence in what is still a highly polarized context. Javier Protzel’s chapter suggests that cinema seems to be the principal way that literature is now consumed in twenty-firstcentury Peru. By looking at three films based on Alonso Cueto’s novels, he analyzes the transition between literary and cinematic languages, as well as the treatment of memory in relation to the armed conflict. In her chapter on La última tarde and La hora final , Karen Bernedo identifies the different approaches to representing the character of the insurgent in Peruvian fiction cinema. By considering the limitations of production and exhibition of this type of film, she also highlights its challenges as part of the contemporary Peruvian debate about memory of the conflict.

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Even though allegorical fiction is the defining feature of most of the films mentioned above, the pressing need to connect with audiences has encouraged many Peruvian art films to adopt and adapt genre conventions: fictions like NN and Magallanes , among others, are examples of the hybrid creativity of Latin American art filmmaking, which Gerard Dapena has connected to this continent’s fundamentally transcultural nature. In his view, the very permeable line between art and genre cinema mirrors to a certain extent the distinctively regional processes of transculturation (2018, p. 151). In addition, the prominent revisiting of the armed conflict on Peruvian screens indicates a turn to cinema as a space for the political,9 but with the notable limitation that this act of reckoning has mostly been the concern of a small segment of society, namely, the artistic and intellectual spheres. While over half the chapters in this section deal with the issue of memory about the armed conflict, it is important to highlight that the diversity of Peruvian art film embraces multiple other topics that make the local translatable on a global scale. Maria Chiara D’Argenio’s contribution, for example, discusses how Wiñaypacha, a regional film in the Aymara language, deploys slow film aesthetics that cater to the tastes of festival audiences worldwide. She also argues that this film overcomes indigenista conventions and reframes Andean indigeneity through a focus on intimacy. Meanwhile, Sarah Barrow’s chapter considers the cinephilic aspects of Omar Forero’s cinema that seem to define him as a “global auteur” (Elsaesser 2016). His work has been compared by critics with the likes of Payne, Kiarostami, Alonso, and Costa, and this contribution highlights the aesthetics of slowness, disruption and austerity that Forero adopts to articulate the impact of neoliberalism on northern Peru. Finally, Daniella Wurst’s analysis of two shorts by another global auteur, Claudia Llosa, combines a discussion about the links between the cinematic and touristic gazes in their representation of the “other” with an exploration of how neoliberal mandates bring constraints and opportunities to the filmmaker as artist. In sum, we wish to highlight that the success of the films in these three sections, whether functioning as artistic commodities or as products for commercial consumption, is strongly connected to the country’s contemporary economic landscape. The broad principle which connects and distinguishes the three sections in this first part is the common need to perform according to the logic of the market.

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Part II: Outside the Dynamics of the Market The second overarching category that frames Peruvian cinema of the twenty-first century comprises those films that refuse to be understood, presented, or experienced as commodities inserted in circuits of profit or prestige. As such, they display an antagonistic relationship toward that type of cinema that depends on market forces, and they inhabit alternative spaces where they make different demands of their spectators. Focusing on practices that emerge from a different logic and understanding of the role of film, the studies included in this section allow us to make visible that part of Peruvian cinema that often otherwise remains unaccounted for. Ranging from fiction, documentary, and hybrid variations all outside conventional film lengths, these works are made by independent filmmakers with purposes related to community-building, agency, selfrepresentation, and the disruption of power relations. They circulate mainly via a growing but quite fragile network of informal cineclubs and alternative venues. Some of these exhibition opportunities have secured a measure of public or private economic support, but they remain examples of the precarious interplay between dynamism and instability that we have identified as being at the heart of contemporary Peruvian cinema. Apart from their circulation in local venues, the films discussed in the chapters in this section have embraced the advantages brought by new online platforms, which allow for global spectatorship and the subsequent emergence of transnational connections. In some cases, these films have transcended the local context and entered a wider space of exposure through small, niche festivals that tend not to be linked to major funding initiatives. Cynthia Vich’s chapter focuses on the films and cinematic practices of Eduardo Quispe Alarcón, an experimental filmmaker whose low-budget and artisanal mode of producing, distributing, and exhibiting cinema locates itself fiercely outside market forces. Mapping his place in the field of Peruvian cinema, the chapter discusses the international influences that shape Quispe Alarcón’s aesthetic, thematic, and anti-industrial choices in relation to his engagement with the local filmmaking milieu and his understanding of the political dimension of cinema as a vehicle of inquiry, resistance, and rehumanization. In Chapter 16, Claudia Arteaga examines the Escuela de Cine Amazónico’s training, production, and circulation processes, and analyzes two short films produced by their students. She

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presents an understanding of cinema as a way of constructing micropolitical spheres for building a sense of belonging, arguing that ECA’s films depart from the usual paradigm of indigenous versus mestizo. In this context, audiovisual language becomes a tool for reflection by indigenous communities on questions of identity. Finally, Isabel Seguí’s chapter critically approaches independent female-led non-fiction projects through analysis of the filmmaking practices of Diana Castro, creative producer of films and festivals, and Lorena Best, director, teacher, and organizer. Seguí draws on oral history from a feminist perspective as a method through which to propose a non-hierarchical film culture that is alternative to commercial and art film logic, and to challenge male-dominated cinephilic paradigms.

Final Thoughts In our attempt to map contemporary Peruvian film according to the categories proposed, this project does not arise from an essentialist belief that any film itself has intrinsically stable features; rather, we wish to highlight cinema’s role in forging multiple social relationships and interactions with space and place. Our desire has been to provide an original perspective from which to observe how economic and political transformations are expressed and discussed in the cinematic sphere. We have set out to showcase the tensions between the commercial and artistic, the local, the regional, the national, and the global, as well as the different relationships between filmmakers and their audiences. This book has been designed to provide a vibrant dialogue that includes and respects a variety of disciplinary approaches within a spirit of debate that embraces different points of view. Unlike traditional scholarly studies of film that tend to focus on well-known box office hits or festival-type art cinema, this volume provides a novel take on Peru’s wide array of filmic production and on the country’s intricate conditions of distribution and circulation, giving equal value both to highly visible and successful features, and to alternatively produced, lesser known works. Until the present time, scholars of Peruvian cinema have had very limited access to resources: most of the scholarship on this topic is located in articles that are scattered across a range of academic journals, edited volumes on Latin American cinema, print magazines, and online publications. There are only a handful of book-length studies on Peruvian cinema in particular, and among them, those written in English focus on quite specific topics and do not set out to offer such a wide-ranging

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picture of cinema in Peru today. The most recently published monograph in the English language, Sarah Barrow’s Contemporary Peruvian Cinema: History, Identity and Violence on Screen (I.B. Tauris, 2018b), explores how Peruvian films represent and respond to the political violence of the country’s internal armed conflict between 1980 and 2000. While it offers an essential contribution to the field, it specifically focuses on the relationship between cinema and the armed conflict, and is centered on films made up until 2003. Prior to that, the first book-length publication on Peruvian film in English was Jeffrey Middents’ Writing National Cinema: Film Journals and Film Culture in Peru (Dartmouth College Press, 2009). This study on film culture is distinctive due to its emphasis on the key role played by Hablemos de cine [Let’s Talk About Film], a Peruvian film journal published during the 1960s and ’70s which developed a transnational perspective within Peruvian film criticism. Of those works written in Spanish, Ricardo Bedoya’s books stand out as the most comprehensive and wide-ranging. His vast contribution has laid the foundations for film scholarship in Peru. Among his publications, the book which coincides with the timeframe of this volume is El cine peruano en tiempos digitales (Fondo Editorial de la Universidad de Lima, 2015), which presents an extensive panorama of all the Peruvian films released between 1996 and 2015. It includes an analysis of a significant selection of those films along with a discussion of their contexts of production and exhibition in a digital age. The second most important scholarship about Peruvian cinema of recent years is Emilio Bustamante and Jaime Luna Victoria’s work on films made outside Lima, questioning the status of the capital city as a hub for national filmmaking. Las miradas múltiples: el cine regional peruano (Fondo Editorial de la Universidad de Lima, 2017) is a two-volume compendium that introduces the reader to the filmic production of Peru´s provinces. It covers the period post-2000 and comprises technical information on regional films, as well as valuable original interviews with the directors. There is also El Perú desde el cine: plano contra plano by Liuba Kogan, Guadalupe Pérez Recalde, and Julio Villa Palomino (Universidad del Pacífico, 2017). Although it contains valuable analyses of some Peruvian films and their production and distribution contexts, this collection of essays nevertheless does not provide a curatorial structure and an overarching introductory text that frames the cinematic landscape in relation to the social, economic, and political context of contemporary Peru. It should also be noted that Isaac León Frías, one of the founding editors of Hablemos de cine, has

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published a collection of his essays named Tierras Bravas: cine peruano y latinoamericano (Fondo Editorial de la Universidad de Lima, 2016) in anthological format, and Violeta Núñez Gorritti has produced four encyclopaedic volumes that each focus on Peruvian cinema at distinct historical periods up to 1950. Finally, other significant works published in Spanish about Peruvian film which focus on specific cinematic forms and industry perspectives include Giancarlo Carbone’s two texts El cine en el Perú el cortometraje: 1972–1992 (Fondo Editorial de la Universidad de Lima, 2007) and El cine en el Perú: 1897–1950: Testimonios (Fondo Editorial de la Universidad de Lima, 1991); Mauricio Godoy’s monograph 180º gira mi cámara: lo autobiográfico en el documental peruano (Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2013), Pablo Malek’s Enfoques, discursos y memorias: producción documental sobre el conflicto armado interno en el Perú (Gato Viejo, 2016); and Mónica Delgado’s María Wiesse en Amauta: los orígenes de la crítica de cine en el Perú (Gafas Moradas, 2020). In our desire to build on this existing scholarship, Peruvian Cinema in the Twenty First Century: Dynamic and Unstable Grounds offers an examination of a wide variety of forms of filmmaking and their corresponding modes of production, distribution, and exhibition. Furthermore, our text combines the work of English and Spanish speaking scholars from different parts of the world and from a range of academic disciplines. Our book distinguishes itself from all previous works in that it offers a rigorously curated view of contemporary Peruvian cinema in its thematic and stylistic diversity, with an emphasis on how this cinema positions itself within or outside different markets in the current neoliberal context. The articles have been selected and arranged taking into account the place of the films they discuss within the four different sections that subdivide the two overarching categories that we have devised as ways of understanding the organizing force that market logics currently have on the landscape of cinema in Peru. As a final note, we wish to highlight that because the traditional Peruvian cinematic canon has been largely male-centered, we are conscious that scholarship needs to acknowledge further the range of work by women that exists in the field. Several of the chapters in our volume have a specific focus on films or production contexts led by women, but we certainly hope that future scholarship on Peruvian cinema will take this exploration to greater lengths. We are encouraged, however, by the high number of female scholars from Peru, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe who have participated in this project. As the first academic book in English that offers a broad critical panorama of the state

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of contemporary Peruvian cinema, this volume opens up multiple directions for future research on what remains a relatively small but powerful contributor to the global film landscape. It provides inquiries into the diversity of modes of filmmaking currently being developed in Peru, showing how the global debates around cinema are played out on and off-screen in a distinctive national context.

Notes 1. This shift toward a more inclusive understanding and practice of Peruvian cinema has incorporated locations, experiences, cultural practices, and artistic sensibilities previously absent from national filmic productions (Bustamante and Luna Victoria, 2017, p. 25). 2. This is equivalent to 6.4 million people escaping poverty during that period. Note that the “poverty rate” refers to the percentage of the population living on US$ 5.5 a day. See: . 3. Ironically, these first elections came after a twelve-year military dictatorship, and saw the first recognized act of the war with the burning of the ballot boxes in Chuschi, Ayacucho. 4. As we explain in more detail further on, Peru’s current president since 2018 is Martín Vizcarra, who came to power after Kuczynski was obliged to resign. 5. As Bedoya (1995) and Barrow (2018a) have noted, the increased dynamism of Peruvian cinema has taken shape despite what has been acknowledged as its “stop-start development.” 6. Our understanding of this parallelism is inflected by an acknowledgement that it can also be uneven in terms of temporal alignment, given that times of economic crisis have sometimes triggered the most creative responses from individual filmmakers in Peru. We further acknowledge that outbursts of productivity have never resulted in any systemic stability that allows for the continuity of a diverse production of Peruvian cinema, nor in the development of any related infrastructure. Within the discussion about the feasibility of a Peruvian film industry, we believe that Alvaray’s concept of “creative industries” (2018, p. 263) which emphasizes the proliferation of independent production companies and distribution outlets, is the most appropriate to characterize the multifaceted ecology of Peruvian cinema. 7. The new decree was published in its entirety through the news media on 8 December 2019, including in El Peruano in the section on “Normas Legales” (pp. 3–9). Detailed information about the lack of public discussion before its issue as well as on the absence of acceptable levels of transparency in ongoing preparations for its implementation, are given in Wiener (2020).

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8. The problem with these figures is that in practice, the percentage has been reduced: in the previous proposal, the minimum amount allocated to regional cinema was 40%; in the decree, it is 30% (Bustamante 2020). 9. This turn (or return) to the political is of a very different nature and motivation to the political filmmaking of the New Latin American Cinema (NLAC) movement of the 60s and 70s, which placed itself in a “third” space of opposition to the commodification of both mainstream and art cinemas. It should be noted that Peruvian cinema, with some notable exceptions, never fully adopted the ideological and aesthetic framework of the NLAC.

Works Cited Alfaro, S., 2013. Peruwood: la industria del video digital en el Perú. Latin American Research Review, 48, Special Issue, pp. 69–99. Alvaray, L., 2018. Transnational Networks of Financing and Distribution: International Co-production. In: M. D’Lugo, A. M. López, and L. Podalsky, eds. 2018. The Routledge Companion to Latin American Cinema. London and New York: Routledge. pp. 251–265. Anderson, B., 1983. Imagined Communities. London: Verso. Barrow, S., 2018a. Portfolio Careers and a New Common Cause: The Conditions for Screen Workers in Peru. In: C. Burucúa and C. Sitnisky, eds. 2018. The Precarious in the Cinema of the Americas. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Barrow, S., 2018b. Contemporary Peruvian Cinema: History, Identity and Violence on Screen. London: I.B. Tauris. Bedoya, R., 1995. Cien años del cine en el Perú: una historia critica. Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Universidad de Lima. Bedoya, R., 2015. El cine peruano en tiempos digitales. Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Universidad de Lima. Bedoya, R., 2019. Lo que requieren los cineastas de todo el país es formación. Lima en Escena [online] 23 December. Available at: [Accessed 20 December 2019]. Bustamante, E., 2016. Pantallas peregrinas. Ideele Revista [online] No. 257. Available at: [Accessed 14 August 2020]. Bustamante, E., 2018. El nuevo cine peruano: un panorama. Modern Language Notes, 133(2), pp. 435–451. Bustamante, E., 2020. Personal Communication with Authors [email] (Personal Communication, 23 March 2020). Bustamante, E. and Luna Victoria, J., 2017. Las miradas múltiples: el cine regional peruano. Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Universidad de Lima.

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Cánepa Koch, G. and Lossio Chávez, F., 2019. La marca país como campo argumentativo y los desafíos de problematizar al Perú como marca. In: G. Cánepa Koch and F. Lossio Chávez, eds. 2019. La nación celebrada: marca país y ciudadanías en disputa. Lima: Universidad del Pacífico and Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. pp. 9–39. Carbone, G., 1991. El cine en el Perú: 1897–1950. Testimonios. Lima, Fondo Editorial de la Universidad de Lima. Carbone, G., 2007. El cine en el Perú: el cortometraje: 1972–1992. Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Universidad de Lima. Castro, R., 2017. Cuaderno de trabajo 39. “En ¡Asu mare! todos somos protagonistas”: rituales de clase y distinción en el nuevo cine de entretenimiento peruano. Lima: Departamento de Ciencias Sociales, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Couret, N., 2018. Mock Classicism: Latin American Film 1930–1960. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dapena, G., 2018. Genre Films Then and Now. In: M. D’Lugo, A. M. López, and L. Podalsky, eds. 2017. The Routledge Companion to Latin American Cinema. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 150–163. Delgado, M., 2019. Ley de cine: apuntes para lograr un cine peruano de calidad. Ideele Revista [online] Available at: [Accessed 6 November 2019]. Delgado, M., 2020. María Wiesse en Amauta: los orígenes de la crítica de cine en el Perú. Bogotá: Editorial Gafas Moradas. Elsaesser, T., 2005. European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press. Elsaesser, T., 2016. The Global Author: Control, Creative Constraints, and Performative Self-Contradiction. In: S. Jeong and J. Szaniawski, eds. 2016. The Global Auteur: The Politics of Authorship in 21st Century Cinema. London and New York: Bloomsbury. pp. 21–42. Falicov, T., 2013. Cine en construcción/Films in Progress: How Spanish and Latin American Filmmakers Negotiate the Construction of a Globalized Art-house Aesthetic. Transnational Cinemas, 4(2), pp. 253–271. Gago, V., 2017. Neoliberalism from Below. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Galt, R. and Schoonover, K., eds., 2010. Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Garcia Canclini, N., 1995. Consumidores y ciudadanos: conflictos multiculturales de la globalización. Mexico, D.F.: Editorial Grijalbo. Godoy, M., 2013. 180º gira mi cámara: lo autobiográfico en el documental peruano. Lima: Departamento Académico de Comunicaciones PUCP. Hayward, S., 2000. Framing National Cinemas. In: M. Hjort and S. Mackenzie, eds. 2000. Cinema and Nation. London and New York: Routledge. pp. 88–102.

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Kapur, J., and Wagner, K. 2011. Neoliberalism and Global Cinema: Subjectivities, Publics, and New Forms of Resistance. In: J. Kapur and K. Wagner, eds. Neoliberalism and Global Cinema: Capital, Culture and Marxist Critique. London and New York: Routledge. pp. 1–16. Kogan, L., Pérez Recalde, G. and Villa Palomino, J., eds. 2017. El Perú desde el cine: plano contra plano. Lima: Fondo Editorial, Universidad del Pacífico. León Frías, I., 2016. Tierras Bravas: cine peruano y latinoamericano. Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Universidad de Lima. Malek, P., 2016. Enfoques, discursos y memorias: producción documental sobre el conflicto armado interno en el Perú. Lima: Grupo Editorial Gato Viejo. Middents, J., 2009. Writing National Cinema: Film Journals and Film Culture in Peru. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press. Núñez Gorritti, V., 1990. Pitas y alambre: la época de oro del cine peruano, 1936–1950. Lima: Editorial Colmillo Blanco. Núñez Gorritti, V., 1998. Cartelera cinematografica ´ peruana 1930–1939. Lima: Fondo de Desarrollo Editorial de la Universidad de Lima. Núñez Gorritti, V., 2006. Cartelera cinematografica ´ peruana 1940–1949. Lima: Consejo Nacional de Cinematograf´ia. Núñez Gorritti, V., 2008. El cine en Lima, 1897–1929. Lima: Consejo Nacional de Cinematograf´ia. Poblete, J., 2018. National Cinema. In: M. D’Lugo, A. M. López, and L. Podalsky, eds. 2018. The Routledge Companion to Latin American Cinema. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 17–20. Poder ejecutivo de Peru, 2019. Decreto de urgencia No. 022–2019. El Peruano [pdf] 8 December, pp. 3–9. Available at: [Accessed 14 March 2020]. Rueda, M. H., 2020. Local Grounding, Transnational Reach: The Films of Héctor Gálvez. In: C. Vich and S. Barrow, eds. 2020. Peruvian Cinema of the Twenty-First Century: Dynamic and Unstable Grounds. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Sandberg, C., 2018. Contemporary Latin American Cinema and Resistance to Neoliberalism: Mapping the Field. In: C. Sandberg and C. Rocha, eds. 2018. Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Resisting Neoliberalism. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 1–23. Tomlinson, J., 1999. Globalization and Culture. Cambridge: Polity. Wiener, C., 2020. Ley de cine: ¿es tan difícil actuar con transparencia? Mano alzada [online] July. Available at: [Accessed 14 August 2020]. World Bank, 2019. The World Bank in Peru: Overview [online] n.d. Available at: [Accessed 28 September 2019].

PART I

THE MARKET DYNAMICS OF PERUVIAN CINEMA

CHAPTER 2

Peru’s Twenty-First-Century Rom-Com Carolina Sitnisky

Peruvian films from the twenty-first century are known in thematic terms both to local as well as international audiences for two main approaches: one is drama, with a focus on the internal armed conflict that the country experienced during the 1980s and 1990s, with productions that did not usually result in solid national box office results. The other is light comedy, with films such as ¡Asu Mare! (2013) and ¡Asu Mare! 2 (2015) that attracted many thousands of viewers to local theaters, and renewed hope of local directors, producers, and distributors in this industry. One might also argue that there was no real film industry in Peru in the second half of the twentieth century when it was characterized by not-so-beneficial and ever-changing regulations and subsidies: a situation

At the time this book is going to print, grave accusations against Frank Pérez-Garland have been made public and confirmed by the filmmaker. The author of this chapter, which was written between 2018 and 2019, and the volume’s editors do not in any way condone Pérez-Garland’s actions. C. Sitnisky (B) Independent Scholar, Los Angeles, CA, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 C. Vich and S. Barrow (eds.), Peruvian Cinema of the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52512-5_2

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described by Sarah Barrow (2018, p. 163), reflecting on overall observations made by Ricardo Bedoya (1995) as a “stop-start development.” The lack of both comprehensive state or private funds for production combined with an uncertain distribution landscape, in which theaters (before the 1990s) and multiplexes (since the mid-1990s) neither fully committed nor were compelled to screen local films, pushed many filmmakers to seek funding support and to develop their careers abroad.1 Perhaps more indicative of the prevalent unevenness of the country’s film production growth during the last decades of the twentieth century was the lack of connection between Peruvian films and Peruvian audiences, something that, with notable exceptions, persists until today. This sort of vicious circle was more perceptible in the 1990s once more films started being produced: national films would not secure the majority of screens and were only exhibited in a few theaters, a situation which subsequently restricted the number of local viewers, and ultimately reduced the level of excitement and promotion for those films. In some cases, this lack of visibility led directors to resort to private screenings, in other cases to piracy, and in many others to screenings in international film festivals, sometimes garnering recognition and awards that were not even suspected locally (or that were acknowledged post-factum). Whether successful or not at the box office, individually each of these films produced in Peru in the 1990s pointed to the dissociation from or distance between national films and local audiences. Almost concurrently, French scholar Pierre Bourdieu was in the process of developing an expansion of our understanding of the production of cultural goods, which seems relevant to this context. In The Field of Cultural Production (2007, p. 115), he proposed a distinction between the domain of restricted production, “a system producing cultural goods (and the instruments for appropriating these goods) objectively destined for a public of producers of cultural goods” and one of large-scale cultural production, “specifically organized with a view to the production of cultural goods destined for non-producers of cultural goods, “the public at large”.” Despite the opposition between these two modes of production and their intended consumers, Bourdieu and Johnson (2007, p. 127) stress that “highly professionalized intellectuals and artists” produce both modes and that they coexist. Interestingly, when Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado (2015, p. 6) examines Mexican cinema of a similar period, specifically from 1988 until 2012, he also points to the creation of a new type of audience, one that would come closer to Bourdieu’s definition

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of ‘public at large’ and which would stem from the middle classes. This new type of cinema relied heavily on the privatization of film production while detaching itself from traditional state-supported models. According to Sánchez Prado (p. 5), this new type of cinema, escapist in tone, and aligned with neoliberal policies and regulations, resulted not only in a change of storylines and plots, but also, and perhaps more importantly, in new aesthetic choices that affected cinema’s language itself, namely, how stories were told with the aim of reaching a wider audience. Following Bourdieu and Johnson’s (2007, p. 125) notions of “largescale” production of “works [that] are entirely defined by their public” and Sánchez Prado’s (2015, p. 114) study, which highlights “the connection between a film’s style and its commercial viability in the emerging cinematic ecosystems”, this chapter examines Peru’s twenty-first-century commercial film production, focusing in particular on romantic comedies’ emphasis on happy endings, straightforward storylines, and their nostalgic recreations of past times with the aim of conceptualizing the ways by which these narrative strategies allowed for this genre to rapidly grow its audience and become economically successful. This type of cultural production, what Bourdieu and Johnson (2007, p. 126) would call “middle-brow art” is the “product of a productive system dominated by the quest for investment profitability; [which] creates the need for the widest possible public” while focusing, as Sánchez Prado (2015, p. 111) would state, on “forms of melodramatic discourse more closely related to Hollywood” than in previous local ones. Following this line of thought, it might be appropriate also to consider Sophia McClennen’s (2019, p. 26) critical framework to understand the local effects of global economies, when she reasons that ‘there is a new generation of filmmakers that is both aesthetically innovative and commercially successful’ and that “[i]n many of these films the aesthetic innovations never stray too far from audience expectations and comfort zones.” In order to examine how these developments, their circumstances and characteristics, are situated in Peru, this chapter studies the case of four Peruvian romantic comedies, all directed by Frank Pérez-Garland: Un día sin sexo [A Day Without Sex] (2005), Ella y él [About Them] (2015), Locos de amor [Crazy in Love] (2016), and Locos de amor 2 [Crazy in Love 2] (2018).2 They all amount to some of Peru’s most watched films in recent years3 and work as evidence that in a very short time, and thanks to the adoption of distinctive aesthetic choices (including, but not limited to, soundtrack; nationally recognizable mise-en-scène, transtextual casting

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and location), this type of Peruvian cinema has been able to compete on box office terms with Hollywood product by adopting and adapting popular genres such as the romantic comedy and the musical to a local context.

The Popularity of Local Rom-Coms In Peru as elsewhere throughout Latin America, comedy is among the genres through which local films compete for viewership. As Juan Poblete (2016, p. 7) asserts “modern Latin American film comedies are one kind of film in which the national product can compete with Hollywood in a much more leveled field than in almost any other film genre.”4 More particularly in the case of Peru, La soga producciones (created by Gustavo Sánchez García in 2008) and Tondero Films (founded by siblings Miguel and Milagros Valladares, also in 2008) are two of Latin America’s most successful production and distribution companies. Both based in Lima, they have produced some of the most iconic, well-regarded and commercially successful Peruvian films since the turn of the century.5 According to Ricardo Bedoya (2015, p. 59), what popular films have in common is that “all make it to the movie theaters after promotional campaigns aligned with today’s marketing practices; they also appeal to social media and create an intense display of the film’s images via teasers, trailers and presentations in other media such as television and outdoor ads, among others.” Bedoya states that unlike the films produced and exhibited in the twentieth century that were distributed and exhibited via 35 mm film rolls to perhaps two dozen theaters in the country, contemporary films are distributed in digital discs and less expensive copies, allowing for up to a hundred copies to reach screens nationwide. Besides these logistical differences, Bedoya’s remarks are noteworthy for this chapter in order to explain what motivates viewers to watch certain films above others, since he specifies how the most successful Peruvian films differentiate themselves from the rest thematically: “Exhibition and audience detachment problems persist in cases of films that portray differentiated or individual styles.” In other words, according to Bedoya, the main factors that resulted in a more viable economic proposition for local films, pushing viewership above the 100,000 spectators—a milestone that was considered until the end of the twentieth century a parameter for victory not only in Peru, but in all of Latin America—included more vigorous promotional efforts, the adoption of the digital medium, and the

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conscious decision from directors and production companies to focus on commercial as opposed to auteur cinema. Moreover, as Poblete (2016, p. 7) adds, generally in comedies “the settings are often simple, the actors are frequently already well-known nationally for their work in similar comedic national radio or TV shows, and a significant portion of the primary material is itself the national situation and the national language.” In light of these considerations, how then do Pérez-Garland’s films fare in this landscape? Are the factors highlighted by Bedoya and Poblete also applicable to Pérez-Garland’s rom-coms? Which are the elements that guaranteed to hit box office jackpots? Overall, Pérez-Garland’s rom-coms performed extremely well in the multiplexes. While the first Locos de amor surpassed one million viewers, making it the fourth most watched film in Peru’s history, Locos de amor 2 had almost 900,000 viewers. The other two films, Un día sin sexo and Ella y él reached more than 100,000 each, but evidently their achievements were not so resounding as with the Locos anthology.6 Why was this the case? Were the differentiating aspects in the plot, the treatment, the talent, or perhaps in the audience’s wants and needs?

Pérez-Garland’s Rom-Coms This section will first briefly examine each of the four Pérez-Garland’s films, and then ponder the factors that might have contributed to their popularity. Un día sin sexo tells the story of four upper-middle class Limeño couples: Alexandra (Carolina Cano), the very young, and sexually inexperienced teenager and Nico (Bruno Ascenzo), a teenage “Latin lover” type; Lucía (Melania Urbina), a young woman in her late twenties with a broken heart, and Pancho (Giovanni Ciccia), a down-to-earth and good-at-heart young man, both still single and looking for love. The third young couple, in their late twenties and whose young marriage is in crisis, is formed by Daniela (Vanessa Saba) and Gonzalo (Paul Vega); and lastly the mature couple, Patricia (Yvonne Fraysinnet) and Felipe (Gianfranco Brero), parents of Alexandra and Pancho and whose marriage is also in crisis. Un día… was a promising first feature film for Pérez-Garland, obtaining awards in the best first film category in Cartagena (2006) and Oaxaca (2007) film festivals. With a lighthearted plot and familiar TV and film actors engaging in simple, yet believable and realistic dialogues, Un día… provides viewers

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with a snapshot of these four couples as they connect, argue and deliberate on matters of love and sex. The film includes scenes of masturbation (Pancho); serious dialogues about sexual preferences while fully naked characters are in bed or in the kitchen (Daniela and Gonzalo); loss of virginity (in different moments of the films all three young couples address this topic); or frustration around sexual impotence (Patricia and Felipe). All of these represent themes that had never before been dealt with in a Peruvian film with such frankness. According to Zoraida Rengifo (2005), this is exactly what attracted the audience to watch this film: “the inability to be happy, the inability to comprehend the needs of others, the inability to surrender, the inability to confront limitations, the inability to be intimate even when in bed.” In other words, this film presents the type of comedy provoked by watching and taking pleasure from the discomfort of others. As Rengifo further noted, the audience shares Pérez-Garland’s perspective and the sense of discomfort is indicated by “censured glances, uncomfortable silences, elusive situations.” While these characters go about their daily lives in Lima or en route to the beach, most of the film takes place in interiors and is shot with artificial lighting. Pancho, who works at an NGO, makes the only seemingly political comment in the film. At one point he addresses the “extreme realities” of people living in the mountains. This brief comment does not necessarily allude to the long-standing years of Peru’s internal armed conflict (1980–2000) or its repercussions in a wide sector of its population. It highlights, on the contrary, the detachment of the film’s characters from the inequalities of neoliberal Peru. Notwithstanding the fact that it is clear from the casting that the story takes place among Limeños in the early 2000s—strengthened by the inclusion of the local slang word “mostro” (to designate something spectacular or cool)—the vagueness in its localization could potentially mean that the identification with place—or lack thereof—does not play a crucial role in the film. Yet, besides the careful selection of wellknown Peruvian TV and film actors, mainly in the case of the three older couples, Un día… reaches its most coveted audience, Peru’s upper-middle class, by capturing its Zeitgeist more holistically. This is achieved thanks to Pérez-Garland’s strategic decision to include a soundtrack comprised of local bands.7 Rengifo (2005) also points to the importance of PérezGarland’s musical decisions: “the central music theme, with the same name as the film and interpreted by Mar de Copas , is a beautiful creation that definitely captures the film’s essence and highlights the attractiveness of its soundtrack.” As if we were in the presence of an MTV music clip,

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the musical score in this film sets the tone to describe the characters’ feelings. Besides the opening and closing credits, throughout the film the characters might hear the soundtrack (as when Lucía, Pancho, Daniela, and Gonzalo are having drinks at Pancho’s place), but for the most part, the songs played are in the background, accompanying actions, and not fully present in its diegesis. In Ella y él we encounter a central couple formed by “Ella” (Vanessa Saba) and “Él” (Giovanni Ciccia) who, having some friends in common, randomly meet at a party. They are both heartbroken from past experiences and both have secrets that the plot slowly reveals. In the words of the director (Pérez-Garland 2015): “Both of them are grown up adults who haven’t been able to move away from their past, and are weighed down by a heavy emotional burden. Both have decided to love in a new way, to start afresh, but their past stories reach them at every step.” So, as in Un día…, Pérez-Garland presents the viewer with the story of two people in a relationship who are playful, hurtful or indifferent to each other. The characters, Ella and Él, are at times physically attracted to one another, and at other times prefer to be left alone. As their love story develops, their dark and painful secrets are revealed: Ella comes from a dysfunctional family whose father has been absent and she has felt continuously betrayed by her parents’ actions. Él feels guilty for the car accident that killed his parents. As a result of these struggles, we hear that Ella has spent many years depressed and medicated, and a caustic Él has cut ties with many friends, preferring to be alone. Toward the end of the film we learn that Él has kept another secret: for years, he has had a relationship with his best friend’s wife (played by Gianella Neyra). Eventually he realizes that he cares for Ella and calls this affair off. After this decision, and in a fascinating sequence, all four characters (Ella, Él, best friend and wife) spend a weekend at the beach. The underlying sexual tensions distinguish Ella y él from many other rom-coms. Ella holds the host couple’s baby in her arms and confesses to Él that she does not want to have children, an unspeakable situation in this genre, particularly in the Latin American case. Despite this most sincere confession, or perhaps because of it, by the end of the film, Ella and Él are visibly in love and at peace with each other. Breaking expectations and stepping out of the genre’s normal format, this film constitutes what Bedoya (2015, p. 59) interprets as an individual style, and as such, does not offer the traditional happy ending of the rom-com, but a personalized variation of it.

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Furthermore, and notwithstanding the selection of two well-known Peruvian actors, along with certain scenes shot by the coastline in Barranco, a recognizable location in Lima, it could be argued again that shooting the majority of the scenes with artificial light in interiors removes much of its association with Peru. In this regard, Valentina Pérez Llosa notes this dissociation when she states (2015): “In the context of present day Peruvian cinema, so much of which is concerned with representing the legacy from the country’s internal armed conflict […] Pérez-Garland’s film is somewhat dissonant: it is about two upper-class people who can afford to go a bit crazy without any concern for money, friends or anything else happening outside Miraflores and San Isidro.” Besides a note in the closing credits that states that the film was shot almost entirely in the Miraflores district, a well-known neighborhood largely dominated by Lima’s upper-middle class and arguably a reductive representation of Peru’s society, there is one other tangible element that brings this film back to Peru and works as its synecdoche, representing this one privileged community as the country’s totality: the remarkable soundtrack.8 Whereas in Un día… the characters could hear the soundtrack, in Ella y él they also perform some of it: placing viewers closer to the plot, shortening the distance between fiction and reality and fostering a stronger spectator identification with the characters and their limited environment. Locos de amor tells the stories of four very different female cousins: Lucía, a successful TV host (Gianella Neyra); Viviana, a sexually driven housewife (Rossana Fernández-Maldonado); Gloria, a devoted housewife (Lorena Caravedo); and Fernanda, an uptight and single workaholic woman (Jimena Lindo). For Sebastián Pimentel (2016), the casting selection and its transtextual link to broadcasting national TV was key to making this film a commercial hit: “(…) the fact that the talent was chosen for being a group of actors who were also friends, a generation of television stars that had known each other for a while, is noteworthy.” He further points out that “Valladares was aware that this stardom (for a while also due to films) was based, for the most part, on the complicity that these actors shared amongst themselves.” The storylines continue the pattern set by Un día… and Ella y él in the sense that these four main characters go through a process of self-discovery to better comprehend their own personal love stories as they struggle to find solutions that satisfy themselves, their friends and families, as well as society at large. When her long-time boyfriend buys a studio apartment, Lucía realizes that he is not ready for marriage. Clueless as to why her husband

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does not seek intimacy between them, Viviana eventually finds out that he is having an affair with a coworker. Gloria realizes that she is bored and does not want to lead her life according to her husband’s decisions and activities. Lastly, when Fernanda finds herself without a job, she is confronted by fears that do not allow her to be fully committed in a personal relationship. In a less ambitiously authorial take to the one Pérez-Garland had applied in his first two rom-coms, screenwriters Bruno Ascenzo and Mariana Silva resolve these conflicts without dwelling on lengthy or in-depth stretches of dialogue. Thus, the four cousins are able to find somewhat simple solutions to their quests: Lucía realizes that she is in love with her long-time and always supportive friend (played by Giovanni Ciccia), so the two end up getting married. Viviana leaves her husband and, in what appears as a very progressive move given her well-to-do social status, she finds a job as a hairdresser. Her estranged and remorseful husband apologizes. The two are on good terms, with an indication that they perhaps get together again. Gloria notices that other people whom she thought were young and adventurous are actually not. When her husband goes above and beyond what might be expected from a predictable writer of self-help manuals (Carlos Carlín) by performing a serenade in full daylight, she returns home feeling that he is very much in love with her. Pregnant after an impromptu encounter with her young and handsome yoga instructor, Fernanda decides to continue with the pregnancy and ultimately gives her suitor and future father of the child a chance. While the storylines are clearly detached from any sociorealist type of temporal or geographical references to present-day Peru, they highlight personal stories and subjective commentary that generate a different sort of association with Peru’s Zeitgeist, one that is clearly limited by the reductive nature of the country’s population depicted here (young and professional upper class Limeños). Besides the casting selection linked to national TV, the inclusion of several scenes with views of downtown Lima, the Barranco neighborhood, as well as scenes shot in a popular bar, Locos is, at least for local audiences, more clearly situated in Lima. Comparable to his first two films, Locos also focuses on couples that fall out of or back into love. Similar to those other rom-coms, it has very popular Peruvian film and TV actors in the main roles, characters that engage in adult conversations, and plots that conclude with happy endings. Moreover, building on the first two rom-coms, in which the distinctive soundtrack is only partially or indirectly a part of the plot, in Locos it is a fully constitutive element. By this I mean that in this

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film, the soundtrack comes full circle by assisting the characters in their storytelling; an observation about aesthetic innovation that also applies to the subsequent film, Locos de amor 2. As a consequence, the rom-com genre in the two Locos anthology films takes a turn to the musical genre. However, the appeal in these two cases is a nostalgic one, an aesthetic decision from Pérez-Garland that detaches the stories from present-day Lima and carries them to a not-so-distant and somewhat undetermined past. Unlike the first two films, the songs performed in Locos are famous Latin American and Spanish ballads from the 1970s,9 the 1980s,10 and the 1990s.11 In line with Sánchez Prado’s assertion (2015, pp. 112–114) that new commercial cinema stakes a claim on nostalgia, Juan Carlos Ugarelli (2016) considers that ‘this new risk by Tondero is successful at least at the box office level, because it has managed to connect much better with those viewers that allow themselves to be overtaken by the nostalgia brought by this music that transports them to the past’, a feasible interpretation that highlights the relevance of the connection between film and audience, and further underscores the distinctive approach taken to the aesthetics of popular film by this director, one that emphasizes local features. On February 14, 2018, Locos de amor 2 made its debut in Peruvian theaters with the evident marketing purpose of connecting the film’s launch to Valentine’s Day celebration. However, Sandro Mairata (2018) does not consider this promotional effort as relevant as the inclusion of famous Peruvian TV and film stars in terms of evaluating what made this film so successful: ‘The actors cast for the first installment had diverse backgrounds (…) The new locos de amor are national heavy-hitters (…).’ Besides a few similarities with the first Locos (including Yordano’s song playing over credits) this second installment had a completely different cast and new storylines. As Locos 2 begins, with the backdrop of the Pacific Ocean, Lucho (Paul Vega) is shown to be contemplating taking his own life, while strolling through Parque del Amor, a public space also inaugurated on February 14 to celebrate love. This very tragic possibility does not happen and is soon forgotten, but it sets the stage for other adult themes to be discussed in the plot. After finding that his former girlfriend is getting married, Lucho feels heartbroken and financially destitute. His friend, single father Vicente (Carlos Alcántara), gives him an opportunity to work as a waiter in his restaurant. Lucho is not looking for love, but will find it in the upper class, impatient and competitive

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psychotherapist and radio host Soledad (Johanna San Miguel). Coincidently, Soledad’s radio show is about lonely people in the city trying to find love. Lucho’s sister, Daniela (Vanessa Saba), is in an unhappy marriage. She is desperate to start a family and her husband, Gian Pietro (Julián Gil), is not. Lucho’s other sister is Alejandra (Érika Villalobos). She is a single and very protective mother. Their stories are complicated by the presence of characters that come to Peru from the United States: Lola (Wendy Ramos), Soledad’s friend, who, tired of her American husband and after entering menopause, feels the urge to have an affair; and Nicolás (Marco Zunino), Alejandra’s former boyfriend, who is still secretly in love with her. Needless to say, given that this is a rom-com, all the stories end on a happy note. Lucho and Soledad are an odd, but contented couple; Lola’s husband travels to Lima to find his wife and serenades her, which makes her enthusiastic about him again; Alejandra accepts that Nicolás is her great love and that he could be a good stepfather to her son. Lastly, madly in love, Vicente happily accepts Daniela’s desire to be a mother. As in Locos, Locos 2 features a potpourri of hit ballad songs from the past fifty years or so, including songs from the 1960s,12 the 1970s,13 the 1980s14 and from the 2000s.15 These songs potentially resonate with a middle-aged Peruvian urban audience, especially when tied to stories about characters in this same age group. As in Locos, they stress Pérez-Garland’s nostalgic take on personal stories, as he looks toward making a deep connection with his mostly upper-middle class Limeño audience.16 As with his previous works discussed here, the star power casting choices for the film were also key to its success as many Peruvians would remember this group of actors for their previous experience as singers: as a former member of the popular teenage band Torbellino, Érika Villalobos recorded the solo album Potente in 2012; Vanessa Saba recorded Hasta el sol in 2005; Johanna San Miguel was a member of the popular band La Liga del Sueño; and Marco Zunino, also a member of Torbellino, had a high profile from his success in musical theater on Broadway.

Conclusion At the beginning of this chapter, I posited questions related to the commercial success of Pérez-Garland’s films and considered the degree to which Pierre Bourdieu’s study of an emerging set of works defined by their audience would be relevant. Likewise, I pointed to Sánchez Prado’s

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and McLennen’s analyses of how the adoption of aesthetic choices such as use of thoughtful soundtrack with highly accessible local connections to popular music and TV; playful endings; and emphasis on a different sort of nostalgia that eschews explicit reference to recent socio-political events, facilitated the ability to compete with Hollywood dominated genres. I also mentioned Juan Poblete’s study on cinema and humor in Latin America, which again emphasizes the importance of connecting with localized popular cultures. In addition, Ricardo Bedoya’s observations on contemporary Peruvian cinema as possible frameworks to measure the level of engagement of Peruvian audiences toward their national cinema have been used to evaluate the success of these films by Pérez-Garland. I now want to revisit the multiple factors that might lead to pleasurable associations between Peruvian audiences and local rom-coms. According to Jorge Licetti (2018, cited in Villavicencio 2018), general manager for New Century Films Peru, “the Peruvian audience sees comedies as family films. Viewers create an affective tie with characters when the circumstances reflected on screen are near to them: a sense of empathy is created in regards to the problems and solutions that these characters humorously present.” The level of empathy that Licetti alludes to here is what Poblete considers the “national situation and the national language” (that is, the use of multiple local references), and what I would rename the “relatability factor.” In other words, and following Poblete’s abovementioned concepts, in the case of Pérez-Garland’s films studied in this chapter, the relatability factor would directly connect Peruvian audiences to the selection of nationally well-known comedy actors, and the use of locally relevant language expressions. Another key factor in addressing the level of likeability of these Peruvian rom-coms for local audiences is the incorporation of known locations into the stories. Just as Paul Julian Smith (2018, p. 65) observes that the film locations in Locos 2 “are very Lima,” in general terms, Eudosio Sifuentes (2018) feels that “romantic comedies have been successful in the Peruvian box office because viewers have identified themselves with them in one way or another.” He further notes that “in these films they recognize Lima or provincial locations, and this is why they feel that the action takes place in the city where they live.” This factor in and of itself is tricky to consider in isolation in the sense that many Peruvian films proactively include well-known locations (the majority of titles written and directed by Francisco Lombardi, Daniel and Diego Vega Vidal, Adrián Saba, and Josué Méndez to name a few who do so) and so location cannot be taken

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as an indication of a straightforward box office success, since their art film characteristics play against them. Just as critical as the locations, then, is the popularity of the talent. Karla Villavicencio (2018) stresses this point: “Because of their long and well-known careers, the actors cast in these films are recognized by the Peruvian audience.” It could be argued that following Hollywood’s traditional production model, Tondero is developing a Peruvian star system that works for local commercial cinema. Keenly aware of this, and exploiting it, Peruvian rom-coms produced by both Tondero and La soga enlist acclaimed actors to participate in all their films (a situation that is also positive for actors) and extra-filmic promotional activity such as advertising and publicity campaigns in traditionally paid print, radio, and television as well as through social media channels. As noted previously, while all these combined elements might attract local viewers to the theaters, there is yet another factor that plays a vital role in this connection and it is the appeal to a sentimental longing for the past, that is, the evocation of happy, escapist and nostalgic memories. To make this assessment, we might also take a look at Tondero’s website, where past and identity are mentioned as foundational elements: “When it comes to film, we cannot talk about the future without mentioning our past and valuing our present. A nation with film production is a nation with history, identity and memory.” Similar to other local box office hits supported by extensive marketing campaigns, such as the ¡Asu Mare! franchise, which also includes popular ballads, dances and fashion from past decades, Pérez-Garland’s rom-coms, in particular his recent Locos and Locos 2, rely heavily on locally recognizable features and thrive on an earnest nostalgic call for local filmmakers and audiences to emotionally reconnect with memories in a non-ideological or apolitical manner, aiming to remember them fondly.

Notes 1. For more on this topic see Barrow (2018) and Bedoya (1995). 2. At the time this chapter and corresponding book manuscript are being completed, Locos de amor 3 (2020) is being released in Peruvian theaters. 3. For more details on box office numbers see: Chávez (2019) and Encinta.utero.pe (2015). 4. Poblete (2016, p. 14) examines and posits important questions that this chapter will not attempt to answer, but that are however critical to understanding how comedies work vis-à-vis local audiences: “how is the national in ‘national cinema’ being defined when it comes to comedies?

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5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

What is their relevance economically, aesthetically, and culturally in the history of Latin American cinema?” Additionally, this chapter does not address the difficulty of romantic comedies, such as the Peruvian ones studied here, to transcend local audiences and succeed with international viewers. For example, La soga is known for Francisco J. Lombardi’s No se lo digas a nadie [Don’t Tell Anyone] (1998), Pantaleón y las visitadoras [Captain Pantoja and the Special Services] (1999), Ojos que no ven [What the Eye Doesn’t See] (2003), Mariposa negra [Black Butterfly] (2006); Eduardo Mendoza de Echave’s Mañana te cuento 1 and 2 (2005, 2008), El evangelio de la carne [The Gospel of the Flesh], (2013); Gastón Vizcarra’s Guachimán (2011); as well as Pérez-Garland’s rom coms Un día sin sexo, Ella y él , Margarita 1 and 2 (2016, 2018) and his two thriller films La cara del diablo (2014) and Rapto (2019). Likewise, Tondero has produced some of Peru’s most commercially successful films in history, such as Ricardo Maldonado’s ¡Asu Mare! 1 and 2 (2013, 2015); Jorge Ulloa’s ¡Asu Mare! 3 (2018); Bruno Ascenzo’s A los 40 (2014); and Pérez-Garland’s rom coms Locos de amor 1 and 2 (2016, 2018). See Chávez (2019) and Encinta.utero.pe (2015) for more details on Peruvian films box office results. Mar de copas , Dolores Delirio, Cementerio club, Los fuckin Sombreros, Chabelo, Hermanos brothers, El ghetto, El hombre misterioso, Indigo, and Pua silencio. This includes songs played and composed by local bands and artists: Ella & Él composed and performed by Mar de copas ’ José Manuel Barrios, Si no estás composed and performed by filmmaker Javier Fuentes-León, Daniel F’s El asesino de la ilusión performed by Ni voz ni voto, and Enrique Urquijo’s No me imagino performed over closing credits by actress Vanessa Saba. Vivir así es morir de amor and Piel de ángel from Camilo Sesto, Quererte a ti from Ángela Carrasco, Dueño de nada by José Luis “Puma” Rodríguez, Eres tú from Mocedades, and Gloria composed by Italian Umberto Tozzi and recorded in Spanish by Sergio Dalma. Pobre diablo from Emmanuel, Que sabe nadie by Raphael, Ya te olvidé from Rocío Dúrcal, Teorema by Miguel Bosé, Quiero ser from Menudo, Bazar from Flans, A esa by José José, Sólo con un beso from Ricardo Montaner, Carmín by Roxana Valdivieso, Si no te hubieras ido from Marco Antonio Solís and the song that gives the title to the film, Locos de amor by Yordano. Cosas del amor from Ana Gabriel and Vicki Carr and Brindaremos por él from José Luis Perales. O quizás simplemente le regale una rosa from Leonardo Favio.

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13. Danny Ribera’s Tantos deseos de ella, Miguel Gallardo’s Hoy tengo ganas de ti and Sólo pienso en ti by Víctor Manuel. 14. Miguel Bosé’s Te amaré and Amante bandido, Pandora’s Cómo te va mi amor, Emmanuel’s Todo se derrumbó dentro de mí, Daniela Romo’s Yo no te pido la lluvia, Ricchi e Poveri’s Será porque te amo, Yuri’s Maldita primavera, A quién le importa by Alaska and Dinarama, and Miguel Ángel Márquez’s Lluvia. 15. Polo Montañez’s Un montón de estrellas. 16. It should be noted that box- office hit Av. Larco [Larco Avenue] (2018) takes a similar nostalgic approach with similar commercial results. However, the two films could not be more different: whereas Locos 2 is completely void of political references and makes no claim to represent the past, Av. Larco’s promises the opposite, yet delivers a reductive and arguably misleading story on the internal armed conflict.

Works Cited A los 40 [Back to School], 2014. [film] Directed by Bruno Ascenzo. Peru: Tondero Films. ¡Asu Mare!, 2013. [film] Directed by Ricardo Maldonado. Peru: Tondero Films. ¡Asu Mare! 2, 2015. [film] Directed by Ricardo Maldonado. Peru: Tondero Films. ¡Asu Mare! 3, 2018. [film] Directed by Jorge Ulloa. Peru: Tondero Films. Av. Larco [Larco Avenue], 2018. [film] Directed by Jorge Carmona. Peru: Tondero Films. Barrow, S., 2018. Portfolio Careers and a New Common Cause: The Conditions for Screen Workers in Peru. In: C. Burucúa and C. Sitnisky, eds. 2018. The Precarious in the Cinemas of the Americas. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ch. 9. Bedoya, R., 1995. 100 años de cine en el Perú: una historia critica. Lima: Universidad de Lima. Bedoya, R., 2015. El cine peruano en tiempos digitales. Lima: Fondo Editorial de Universidad de Lima. Bourdieu, P. and Johnson, R., 2007. The Field of Cultural Production. Cambridge: Polity Press. Chávez, R., 2019. Análisis de la taquilla del cine peruano del 2018 [online] Available at: [Accessed 14 September 2019]. Echevarría, J., n.d. Un día sin sexo [online] Seattle, United States of America: Imdb.com. Available at: [Accessed 14 September 2019].

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El evangelio de la carne [The Gospel of the Flesh], 2013. [film] Directed by Eduardo Mendoza de Echave. Peru: La soga producciones. Ella & él [About Them], 2015. [film] Directed by Frank Pérez-Garland. Peru: La soga producciones. Encinta.utero.pe, 2015. Todo lo que necesitas saber sobre la taquilla del cine peruano en el 2015 [online] Lima, Peru: Encinta.utero.pe. Available at: [Accessed 14 September 2019]. Guachimán, 2011. [film] Directed by Gastón Vizcarra. Peru: Star Films. La cara del diablo [Face of the Devil], 2014. [film] Directed by Frank PérezGarland. Peru: La soga producciones and Star Films. Locos de amor [Crazy in Love], 2016. [film] Directed by Frank Pérez-Garland. Peru: Tondero Films. Locos de amor 2 [Crazy in Love 2], 2018. [film] Directed by Frank PérezGarland. Peru: Tondero Films. Mairata, S., 2018. Locos de Amor 2 [online] Lima, Peru: Medium.com. Available at: [Accessed 3 June 2019]. Mañana te cuento, 2005. [film] Directed by Eduardo Mendoza de Echave. Peru: Aldea. Mañana te cuento 2, 2008. [film] Directed by Eduardo Mendoza de Echave. Peru: Star Films. Margarita, 2016. [film] Directed by Frank Pérez-Garland. Peru: La soga producciones. Margarita 2, 2018. [film] Directed by Frank Pérez-Garland. Peru: La soga producciones. Mariposa negra [Black Butterfly], 2006. [film] Directed by Francisco J. Lombardi. Spain and Peru: Fausto producciones cinematográficas and Inca Films. McClennen, S. A., 2019. Globalization and Latin American Cinema: Toward a New Critical Paradigm. [S.l.]: Palgrave Macmillan. No se lo digas a nadie [Don’t Tell Anyone], 1998. [film] Directed by Francisco J. Lombardi. Peru and Spain: Inca Films and Lola Films. Ojos que no ven [What the Eye Doesn’t See], 2003. Directed by Francisco J. Lombardi. Peru: Aldea. Pantaleón y las visitadoras [Captain Pantoja and the Special Services], 1999. [film] Directed by Francisco J. Lombardi. Peru and Spain: América producciones and Inca Films. Pérez-Garland, F., 2015. Ella y él: Storyline [online] USA: Imdb.com. Available at: [Accessed 3 June 2019].

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Pérez Llosa, V., 2015. Ella y Él: excesos dramáticos [online] Lima, Peru: La mula. Available at: [Accessed 3 June 2019]. Pimentel, S., 2016. Locos de amor: nuestra crítica de la película peruana [online] Lima, Peru: Elcomercio.pe. Available at: [Accessed 3 June 2019]. Poblete, J., 2016. Cinema and Humor in Latin America: An Introduction. In: J. Poblete and J. Suárez, eds. 2016. Humor in Latin American Cinema. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Rapto, 2019. [film] Directed by Frank Pérez-Garland. Argentina and Peru: Aleph cine and La soga producciones. Rengifo, Z., 2005. Indisciplina del amor: un día sin sexo [online] Lima, Peru: Larepublica.pe. Available at: [Accessed 3 June 2019]. Sánchez Prado, I. M., 2015. Screening Neoliberalism: Transforming Mexican Cinema 1988–2012. Nashville, Tennessee: Vanderbilt University Press. Smith, P. J., 2018. Screenings Letter from Peru: Teen Telenovela, Popular Comedy, Auteur Cinema. Film Quarterly, 72, pp. 64–68. The-Numbers.com. Peru Movie Index [online] Beverly Hills, United States of America: The-Numbers.com. Available at: [Accessed 14 September 2019]. Tondero Films, 2019. Casa realizadora [online] Lima, Peru: Tondero.pe. Available at: [Accessed 3 June 2019]. Ugarelli, J. C., 2016. Locos de amor: una oportunidad perdida [online] Lima, Peru: Cinencuentro. com. Available at: [Accessed 3 June 2019]. Un día sin sexo [A Day Without Sex], 2005. [film] Directed by Frank Pérez-Garland. Peru: La soga producciones. Villavicencio, K., 2018. Comedias románticas peruanas son la nueva fórmula del éxito [online] Lima, Peru: Medium.com. Available at: [Accessed 3 June 2019]. Zabala, S., 2015. Ella y él de Frank Pérez-Garland: un drama honesto y potente [online] Lima, Peru: Cinencuentro.com Available at: [Accessed 3 June 2019].

CHAPTER 3

Con Nariz (blanqui-)roja: Peruvian Comedy, Marca Perú and ¡Asu Mare! Jeffrey Middents

Near the end of the short viral video titled Peru, Nebraska (2011), we see images of the rural Midwest of the United States in wintertime, with tan vegetation across a relatively flat landscape with a single radio antenna jutting up toward the cloudless blue sky; over these images comes an aria, sung by a tenor. But this is not any tenor voice, this is Juan Diego Flórez, a celebrated Peruvian opera singer whom in 2013 Luciano Pavarotti declared as his successor. The camera will indeed cut to Flórez singing in the studio at KNCY, a radio station in nearby Nebraska City that usually plays country music. While sung in operatic style, however, the aria is actually an a cappella version of Chabuca Granda’s La flor de la canela, perhaps the most famous vals criollo [Creole waltz] about a woman proudly walking through the streets of Lima: “From the bridge to the promenade, her tiny feet have taken her/Along the sidewalk that trembles to the rhythm of her hips./She gathered the laughter from

J. Middents (B) American University, Washington, DC, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 C. Vich and S. Barrow (eds.), Peruvian Cinema of the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52512-5_3

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the river’s breeze/And threw it to the wind from the bridge to the promenade.”1, 2 The 2011 viral video which came to be known as Peru, Nebraska, directed by Ricardo Maldonado, was the first major media element associated with the nation branding campaign known as Marca Perú. This marketing effort was crafted by the Peruvian government, according to the official website, as an outward-facing campaign to “effectively transmit the value proposition, promoting tourism and exports and attracting investments.”3 The most constant element within the film is a red bus prominently emblazoned with the new logo: the word “Perú,” with a stylized spiral through the upper part of the capital “P.” Despite Marca Perú’s international dimension, the short film was part of the national campaign, a viral video designed specifically for a Peruvian audience and featuring faces and personalities that would have been familiar to the cultural elite in Peru on a variety of fronts. Among the group that traveled to Nebraska was Carlos Alcántara, a comedian then famous primarily for his founding and starring in Patacláun, a smart and very popular theatrical (and then television) program from the late 2000s. Two years later in 2013, Maldonado would direct ¡Asu Mare!, an adaptation of Alcántara’s stand-up act, which would quickly become the most widely seen film in Peru of all time. It should be noted that this was not just the highest earning film made in Peru, but also the most financially successful film shown in Peru from anywhere, surpassing Steve Martino and Mike Thurmeier’s Ice Age: Continental Drift (2012) from the previous year.4 The film turned Alcántara into a bona fide movie star and Tondero Films , its production company, into a cultural juggernaut. The movie’s closing credits also feature a familiar sight: while credits scroll up the right side of the screen and a live version of Alcántara’s stand-up performance plays on the left, the bottom of the screen is dominated by a red, wavy banner with an animated version of the now-familiar Marca Perú logo (Fig. 3.1). The prominent appearance of Marca Perú as the newly sanctioned emblem of peruanidad as a marketing strategy invites a consideration of how a film like ¡Asu Mare! contributes to the question of Peruvian national cinema writ large. Critics have ignored comedies that cater to internal Peruvian markets precisely because they have usually been poorly written and directed productions that capitalize on television personalities that could not sustain the length of a feature. Normally dependent on national and transnational funding sources that have an eye toward an

Fig. 3.1 End credits of ¡Asu Mare! (Ricardo Maldonado 2013), featuring Carlos Alcántara doing stand-up and the Marca Perú logo across the bottom of the screen

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exported idea of the country, most Peruvian films up to 2013 manifested an aesthetic, tone and subject matter more familiar to the film festival circuit, as this had been what defined “success.”5 In contrast, ¡Asu Mare! never screened at film festivals, and producers never commissioned subtitles for the film, deciding that even to export it to other Spanish-speaking countries would be a futile effort as the film was “too Peruvian.” But, as Rodrigo Chávez notes, comedies—particularly those made by production company Tondero Films and especially those directly affiliated with the ¡Asu Mare! franchise—make up the majority of the domestic box office and are credited with firmly establishing a film-going population, with returns of well over 2 million spectators annually since 2013 (2019). This chapter contextualizes ¡Asu Mare! as the start of the twenty-firstcentury trend of successful popular comedies within larger historic debates concerning Peruvian national cinema, and considers the ways that the aesthetics and ideology of these comedies relate to the nation branding efforts of Marca Perú.

Peruvian National Cinema vs. Popular Comedy When we talk about national cinema—and especially about Peruvian cinema—in an early twenty-first-century context, we are almost always talking about so-called “art films,” those that address topics and aesthetics that cater to transnational film festivals. Tamara Falicov notes that “Financing and support at international film festivals are part of a larger system that facilitates and encourages the production of what one might call a transnational or global aesthetic that helps films more easily cross boundaries” (2010, p. 6). This transnational aesthetic also depends on a certain recognition of thematic and visual elements: in a most clichéd example, “Peru” can instantly be emblematized through establishing shots of the Andes as mysterious yet haunting such as those in Francisco Lombardi’s 1988 film La boca del lobo [The Lion’s Den] or Peter Brosens and Jessica Woodworth’s 2009 film Altiplano.6 Falicov also notes, however, that particularly for films that are provided with funding by festivals through programs like the Hubert Bals Fund or the World Cinema Fund, “transnational films are shaped to be more universally understood, [and] such sponsorship can help reinforce assumptions that Northern audiences might historically have about the South” (2010, p. 7). Such films reaffirm that the Global South can only be authentic if it is poor, and thus such poverty is displayed on screen.

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As with filmmaking from much of the rest of the world, Peruvian cinema has a complicated relationship between its depiction of urban and rural spaces within a transnational context, as these spaces have tended to reaffirm transnational assumptions. Catherine Fowler and Gillian Helfield provide useful insight as to how depictions of contemporary national identity are achieved through cinema, commenting that: “underlying all rural cinema is a contemporary consciousness that complicates yet also specializes its apparent attachment to the past, while at the same time drawing it nearer to the concerns of urban cinema” (2006, p. 3). This is a particular struggle for Peruvian identity: on the one hand, part of its “value” is deeply rooted in the past, be it ancient (Incas, or pre-Inca cultures, as expressed in sites such as Macchu Picchu or the Nazca lines) or colonial, and to the land, with an emphasis on agriculture. On the other hand, Lima in particular has rapidly become a center of modernity that invites transnational participation on a variety of cultural and economic fronts. This concern about how nationally produced cinema should be “made for export” within a film festival context is not something new or imposed by foreign spectators, as there is evidence of the same mindset from the young film critics in Peru in the 1960s. The editors at the influential Lima-based film journal Hablemos de cine wrote a scathing review within their first year of publication for Intimidad de los parques [The Intimacy of Parks] (1965), a film produced in Peru in 1965 by Argentinean Manuel Antín based on works by Julio Cortázar. The review, signed with all the editors’ names, found the film “aspired to be a version of [Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad]” but was instead “an unoriginal experiment in plagiarism” (León Frías et al. 1965a, pp. 41–42). The editors felt so strongly about how the film might be received outside that they dedicate the issue’s introductory editorial to blasting it further, ending with: “The only thing left for us to add is our conviction that this film should not represent Peru at Cannes. Our reasons are included in our review of the film; we only mention this here [in the editorial] because we believe it is essential for the wellbeing of our cinema that a wrong impression of Peruvian cinema is not communicated abroad—and particularly at such an important festival” (1965b, p. 4). The editors anticipated a far more acute trajectory for international recognition of Peruvian film—it would take nearly 20 years for Jorge Reyes’ La familia Orozco [The Orozco

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Family] (1982) to screen at Cannes—but the concern that a “bad” Peruvian film like Antín’s would “misrepresent” national cinema was a genuine concern for local critics. The genesis of a canon of Peruvian cinema has therefore tended to overlook what does not fit this model of art cinema that could also function as exportable, which means that popular cinemas—and especially comedies—are often overlooked within discussions of Peruvian cinema. Sarah Barrow (2007) makes a claim for Alvaro Velarde’s 2003 comedy El destino no tiene favoritos [Destiny Has No Favorites] (2003), which comically follows a wealthy, lonely woman who initially disapproves of a soap opera filming at her luxurious house, but then becomes the breakout star; while a comedy, its higher production values and attention to detail with regard to the mise-en-scène move it closer to the “art film” category, and the film reached neither a popular nor international audience in part perhaps due to its hybrid position. By contrast, Pablo Salinas (2015) makes an innovative argument for the dramatization of the rise to popularity of the chicha musical group Los Shapis in Juan Carlos Torrico’s Los Shapis en el mundo de los pobres [The World of the Poor] (1986). He argues that, along with the group’s enormous popularity, the film’s accurate reflection of Andean migrants helped buoy the film to financial success—even as the film’s basic aesthetics, reflected in very poor videotape quality of the mid-1980s, left it ignored by the critical community. There is a growing trend in other Latin American cinemas in the role of comedy as a genre within national contexts, and consideration of this helps to understand the positioning of Peruvian comedy. Juan Poblete and Juana Suárez’s 2016 edited collection Humor in Latin American Cinema begins to contextualize the historical resonances of comedies on cinemas, paying particular attention in their introduction to the familiar subgenres Brazilian chanchada and the Mexican comedia ranchera in their introduction, and Nilo Couret’s (2018) extensive work in Mock Classicism: Film Comedy, 1930–1960 demonstrates how comedies helped foster more localized viewing perspectives that set the stage for the more critically demanding films of the later years. Scholars have examined more contemporary comedies of the late twentieth century as a confirmation and reflection of the neoliberal state. Romantic comedies figure as key examples in Ignacio Sánchez Prado’s argument that “Mexican cinema allows for the reading both of the process through which private enterprise competes with the State in the production of cultural commodities

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and the way in which actual films perform or resist the cultural values and implications of the neoliberal process” (2014, p. 7). Marketed as it is under the banner of Marca Perú, ¡Asu Mare! demonstrates how statesponsored entities can use popular comedy to subsume elements of private enterprise within the branding mechanism of the state.

Marca Peru´ and Peru, Nebraska Formally announced in March 2011 as a branding initiative directly related to the work of the Comisión de Promoción del Perú para la Exportación y el Turismo [Commission for the Export and Tourism Campaigns], known as PromPerú, and Ministerio de Comercio Exterior y Turismo, MINCETUR [Ministry of External Trade and Tourism], Marca Perú uses the stylized representation of the word “Perú” seen in the closing credits of ¡Asu Mare! as its key logo. Developed by the transnational marketing firm Future Brand, the emblem focuses on the stylized spiral of the capital “P” which, according to promotional material released in 2011 by the business school CENTRUM , is meant to simultaneously reference the ancient representation of the Nazca lines as well as the “@” symbol used in more contemporary digital iconography (2011, p. 42). In addition to being affiliated with agriculture (in the form of support for #SuperFoodsPeru, a hashtag campaign to support Peruvian products internationally) and sport (through, for example, promoting the 2019 Pan American Games in Lima), Marca Perú is also affiliated with the Peruvian Film Commission (itself rebranded as “Made in Peru”), which markets filming locations to bring external film and television productions.7 Coinciding with the international outreach of the program, Marca Perú coordinated a number of nationally focused branding campaigns, with the goal of generating everyday Peruvians as “ambassadors.” Released less than two months from Marca Perú’s founding, the short documentary known as Peru, Nebraska introduced a small town in the United States (“population: 569”) where certain rights—the right to eat good food, the right to take a domestic flight from the Amazon to the ocean; the right to surf the world’s longest waves, etc.—were missing from their lives: as the voice-over insists, “They are Peruvian, but they don’t know what that means.” To right this wrong, several Peruvian “ambassadors”—including actors Magaly Solier, Carlos Alcántara, and Gonzalo Torres del Pino; celebrity chef Christian Bravo; champion

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surfer Gabriel Villarán; and even a Peruvian hairless dog—travel there on a sparkling, red bus emblazoned with the Marca Perú logo on its side. Peru, Nebraska finds its humor primarily through its fish-out-of-water concept: the Peruvians that arrive on the bus are not like the “Peruvians” that live in the town of Peru; in fact, the Peruvians visiting from South America are seen as far more cultured, multilingual and urbane than the Americans. The Nebraskans respond to each introduced element with surprise and wonder, gamely accepting the strange food, music, and even animals that are not “native” to the region. In order to accomplish this, Maldonado starts the short by visually emphasizing the rural aspects of Nebraska with aerial shots of the red Marca Perú bus contrasting with brownish vegetation characteristic of winter farmland in the Midwestern United States; shots taken from the bus show farmhouses, trailers, and tractors—and, significantly, very few people—within this landscape. Emphasizing the pastoral isolation and relative backwardness of Nebraska, particularly with such muted hues, sets up the Peruvians as reverse cultural colonizers that bring much-needed (and well-received) color. The South American “conquest” is then finalized with an aerial shot at the very end of the film, showing the town water tower: white with black lettering showing “PERU,” the structure is shown with a figure using a large roller painting a red accent on the “U,” effectively leaving the color associated with the bus (and the campaign) as a permanent stamp on the town and a linguistic colonization of the town’s name. The voice-over then redirects the theme back to the implied Peruvian viewer: “Peru is a great brand: we are all invited to be its ambassadors.” The video was a large success, having been viewed online well over 1.5 million times worldwide by June 2019. Three of the personalities that emerge from the bus are actors; while Magaly Solier would be internationally recognized for her lead role in the Oscar-nominated and Berlinale Golden Bear winning film by Claudia Llosa, La teta asustada [The Milk of Sorrow] (2009), the other two are comedians who came to prominence with the popular television program Patacláun (1997– 1999): Gonzalo Torres del Pino and Carlos Alcántara. In his history of Peruvian television, Fernando Vivas Sabroso notes that Patacláun became a television phenomenon first for injecting new ideas concerning both social content and improvisation into television comedy; significantly, however, the show went off the air in 1999 on an artistic high, due to individual actors’ careers expanding and some pressure to internationalize a program whose comedy depended on the use of localized, Peruvian

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slang (2001, pp. 223–224). The casting of these three actors—Solier as a transnational figure; Alcántara and Torres as nationally based television personalities—as ambassadors to Marca Perú’s overall program suggests a bifurcated approach to how to appeal to enthusiasts of both art-house (which we might read as external) and popular (internal) entertainment.

¡Asu Mare! Director Ricardo Maldonado says that he first started to see the potential of a feature film with Carlos Alcántara when he filmed the scene with the police officer for Peru, Nebraska (2011). By this point, the actor was already a figure known both for his television work and his successful one-man stand-up performance tour called ¡Asu Mare! In this part of the documentary, however, Alcántara approaches an American police officer in his squad car and convinces him to trade his box of doughnuts for a plate of picarones. The tone of the interchange is set up immediately, however, when Alcántara taps on the squad car’s window and humorously asks for “¡Documentos!” [papers!] as if he were the police officer having just pulled over a car himself; his rapid-fire explanation then seemingly steamrolls over the confused policeman (called “Mister,” as an unknown gringo), who is convinced to “change” his box of doughnuts. Maldonado keeps the visual focus on the policeman through the window with only Alcántara’s hands and upper body (in a red jacket, naturally) in frame holding the plate of picarones; the emphasis is on his voice, excitedly allowing the humor to dictate the situation. This short scene is the most explicitly comedic part of the short, going beyond the mere situational elements, and shows off Alcántara’s improvisational talents, but the patter is also decidedly urban in its use of slang and even the light teasing of the policeman-as-authority-figure (Fig. 3.2). The film ¡Asu Mare! was born out of Alcántara’s successful one-man show of the same name that he had developed since 2007; the title references both the ubiquitous Peruvian phrase used to express surprise and Alcántara’s own mother, the subject of much of his show. The movie uses his own story to develop a character called Cachín (similar to his Patacláun character, Machín) who rises from obscurity thanks to the never-flagging support of his single mother Chabela. To do so, however, Maldonado and Alcántara develop the world around the character, going all the way back to his birth in 1964; in doing so, the movie becomes a period piece and an examination of Lima as a whole, building on familiar

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Fig. 3.2 Carlos Alcántara offers a doughnut to an American police officer in Ricardo Maldonado’s internet short Peru, Nebraska (2011)

tropes of class divisions across the city. This mode of familiar, semiautobiographical examination plays out as a less tragic variation of Mario Vargas Llosa’s breakout 1963 novel La ciudad y los perros [The Time of the Hero] (1963), where a young man breaks from his posh upbringing in Miraflores to attend military school in Callao in part to get over a failed effort at adolescent love. Both texts even introduce the centrality of the neighborhood friendship group among boys through the stereotypical male pastime: football (soccer). Pablo Salinas clarifies that these scenes reaffirm the very masculinist attitude that typifies Peruvian filmmaking in general: “When we hear the song ‘Perú campeón,’ it is precisely so that we may identify with the boys’ football prowess and feel solidarity with the boys running with the ball. When the protagonist says that [in the neighborhood] ‘they respect you for how you handle the ball,’ it is to reaffirm the traditional—and traditionalist—narrative, leaving out half of the audience (the female half) to figure out how to rearticulate these symbols to feel the same spectatorial pleasure” (2016, p. 261).8 I would add that the slow-motion images of the boys playing adds a counterpoint to the rapid polka of the soccer anthem. This football scene, however, calls attention to the film’s use of nostalgia: after all, “Perú campeón” hearkens back to the early 1970s— exactly the period when Alcántara was growing up—when the Peruvian national soccer team was experiencing great success, making three World Cup appearances in a row. (Peru’s success in returning to the competition

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in 2018 was not apparent at the film’s release in 2013.) The bright colors that permeate the mise-en-scène obscure any indication of economic issues felt by the country during the military government of Morales Bermúdez in the late 1970s or, later, the effects of the Shining Path terrorist organization in the 1980s. Only a single line of dialogue in the movie references the day-to-day concerns of this period: in an attempt to make money, Cachín becomes a (terrible) door-to-door salesman; when he tries to sell a vacuum cleaner, the offer comes with a battery to help with the frequent apagones [blackouts] experienced by the entire city. We never see anyone actually experience these blackouts, however, and one would have to know that information to infer the joke properly. Thus, in many ways, this decontextualized/depoliticized candy-colored image of Lima intentionally fails to give the full picture.9 Discussing Chilean cinema, Juan Poblete argues that twenty-first-century comedies “explore their history and contradictions, their continuities and transformations, insisting as much on the familiar as on its defamiliarization, dwelling both on dynamics of integration and segregation” (2016, pp. 249–250). I would argue that ¡Asu Mare! does the opposite here, using comedy to have Alcántara’s Everyman forget this more problematic history, engaging instead with the more immediate past where fame triumphs over adversity and brings him to popular acceptance. ¡Asu Mare! innovatively weaves two narrative structures as the film continues: on the one hand, Cachín’s story is told (by Alcántara) in voiceover, showing his childhood neighborhood in Mirones as he grows from boyhood through a series of hardships through to the beginnings of the Patacláun theater program; intercut into these narrative pieces are recreations of his one-man show, where he riffs on stage for an audience with a small band providing musical commentary. Maldonado thus brings the stage version and the freshness of improvised performance into the film and, by literally showing audience responses, asks the viewer to laugh as well. As these performed pieces are set in the present, however, notable costume changes indicate the flashback nature of the narrative sequences. Cachín emerges as an Everyman—but not even an Every-Peruvian as much as an Every-Limeño, as his connection to the city becomes rather pointed. Once again, “Perú campeón” may be seen as a moment of national solidarity through football—but the film concentrates entirely on urban figures. Despite overwhelming internal migration through the 1980s—reflected in more realist movies like those by Grupo Chaski— no migrant serrano [from the mountains] is introduced as a character

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throughout the film. We are instead invited as spectators to also read Cachín as white; though his first “performance” as a child finds him dancing the Afro-Peruvian style festejo [celebration], this is viewed as an entertaining anomaly by those watching him. Only when Cachín must report for military service is the viewer asked to question his race: after his friend is classified by the military functionary on the official form as “white,” Cachín is classified as “mestizo” [mixed heritage]; he subsequently tries to correct the officer for each of his physical attributes. “This,” intones Alcántara in the voice-over, “began my period of being a huevón [asshole]. You know: when you find the way you see yourself is totally wrong.” Salinas demonstrates how the film establishes Alcántara as a criollo subject, but this also asks us to question both the viewer and the implied viewer of a film like this, for this is only funny if we (like Cachín himself) have also followed the idea that Alcántara was racially white (2016). Coming twenty minutes into the picture, this interaction asks the viewer to reconsider how race and Alcántara’s leading man status relate and reconfigure in this film. The stand-up portion of the film—which this revelation immediately turns to—allows Alcántara to address his own complicated ethnicity, even as it goes unsaid: with so much emphasis on his mother (who is also coded throughout as white or white-passing), this moment also invites us to consider Cachín’s absent and never-mentioned father as someone whose ethnic background is at least partly indigenous. Cachín’s childhood festejo performance is bookended by another dance at the end of the film, when he encounters Emilia, a white woman from the wealthy district of Miraflores and who becomes the love of his life. When he sees her at a party in the neighborhood, she is dancing with a black man, prompting Cachín to reflect via internal monologue: “When I first met her, I wanted to be blond. Now, I wish I were black!” As he starts to dance, he further muses: “In the end, the woman of my life – unattainable, stuck-up, the one I thought I could never get because I was a guy from the streets – turns out to be more ‘street’ than me!” This comes after she says that she thinks about him every night—but, jokingly, because she sees him on television all the time. Her ability to transcend class comes from her privilege being white and wealthy; his, meanwhile, comes from his fame and success. They meet in the middle, coded in different ways. Whereas most Peruvian comedies (cinematic and, more commonly, televisual) focus on broad slapstick action and easy cultural clashes concerning race or gender that serve only to confirm stereotypes, ¡Asu Mare!, while admittedly continuing to do this, also makes use of the

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trope of the stand-up routine combined with the voice-over to invite a metafictional critique that distinguishes the film. Toward the very end of the film, at a low point when he appears depressed and is sleeping off drug-induced stupors on the street, Cachín sees a young boy with a red clown nose begging from car to car; the boy approaches him and gives him the nose, telling him he looks funny. The red nose marks a turning point in the narrative—but one that Peruvian viewers in 2018 would be very familiar with, as it is also the defining visual marker for the successful television program Patacláun. The montage sequence that follows shows the early rehearsals for the theater troupe with a voice-over that explicitly references comedy: “I wasn’t going to make fun of other people; I was going to make fun of myself. Because to be a clown, you have to learn how to look at yourself—and laugh at what’s there.” Going back to Peru Nebraska then, Marca Perú invites us to take this further: is ¡Asu Mare! asking Peruvians to consider laughing at themselves in order to get beyond the pain and the depression associated with the political and economic crisis of the period that is referenced on screen? If we read Cachín as an Every-Peruvian, this moment turns the critical potential of the film back to the individual instead of to the state. The red noses are, indeed, not the red-white-red tricolor of the Peruvian flag; they are simply red, alone.

Déjame que te cuente, Limeño/Let Me Tell You, Limeño… I return to the elements mentioned at the outset of this chapter: the closing credits of ¡Asu Mare! that associate the film explicitly with the Peruvian nation branding project, and the song Flor de la canela by Chabuca Granda, sung in Peru, Nebraska by Juan Diego Flórez and viewed within the context of the viral video as emblematic of Peru itself. Granda herself said that the song is homage to a specific woman, Victoria Angulo, “a dignified black woman to whom the capital would have to lay down in worship” (n.d.). Yet the song has been viewed as a nostalgic love letter to the city of Lima itself, beautifully evoking images of “the old bridge, the river and the promenade” all remembered and recounted in the past-imperfect tense. And of course, there is the admonition of the first line of the song itself: “Let me tell you, Limeño….” The first line is a call to attention: the singer wants the listener, that native of Lima, to listen and to really understand; when the line repeats after the first chorus, the

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singer generally seems to be insisting, pleading. But Granda, of course, was also Limeña: while the admonition seems linguistically to be directed by someone from the outside toward Limeños, she is actually singing to Limeños like herself, about yet another person who she considers to be the epitome of a Limeña. This is very much the same impression that Marca Perú has on a national level with its internally directed video campaigns. In his analysis of Peru, Nebraska, Moshe Palacios Sialer delineates how the “Limeño footprint that exposes the cultural hegemony of the elites from the capital” serves to “affect the society at the macrostructural level—that is to say, to affect the Peruvian way of thinking” (2019, pp. 111–113). Ironically, Peru, Nebraska takes Peruvian viewers abroad in order to demonstrate the wonder of Peru, but that vision is created by Peruvians and for Peruvians. Maldonado and Alcántara return geographically with ¡Asu Mare! to Lima to represent a mediated image of Peru to and for itself through Limeño comedy. As ¡Asu Mare! ends its double narrative with Carlos Alcántara emerging victorious from his rags to riches story, the branding emblem at the end also encourages us to see him—and the movie—as quintessentially Peruvian, one that expresses hope and possibility that we, too, can defy class and race structures to become a success both romantically and professionally. The lasting effects of ¡Asu Mare! on twenty-first-century Peruvian filmmaking are significant, particularly as the film jump-started renewed interest in Peruvian national film through comedy—but, seemingly, only if the films are similar to ¡Asu Mare! In fact, Tondero Films produced the original film with no state-funded support—outside of the participation of Marca Perú—and has since been the dominant production house in Peru throughout the 2010s. “To talk about the success of Peruvian cinema in the last few years,” writes Chávez in an analysis of comedies in 2018, a record-breaking year at the box office, “is to talk about the success of Tondero” (2019). The success of ¡Asu Mare! has allowed the production house to diversify into co-production and distribution of more auteur-based art films like Salvador del Solar’s Magallanes (2015) and Joanna Lombardi’s Solos [Alone] (2015), but their primary moneymaker remains the ¡Asu Mare! franchise. While it might be fair to note that ¡Asu Mare! had an innovative two-pronged narrative structure that set it apart from most of the more mundane commercial features—Cachín’s growing up intermixed with Alcántara’s stand-up performance—this device is not repeated in either of the film’s two sequels. ¡Asu Mare! 2 (2015) and ¡Asu

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Mare! 3 en Miami (2018) continue to establish Cachín as the central figure within a comedic franchise, as (respectively in each film) he gets married to Emilia and then becomes a father. Both films capitalize on the original film’s overwhelming popularity, while retaining little of its innovation. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that ¡Asu Mare! and its box office appeal does not have an effect on Peruvian cinema writ large; for one thing, the continuing success of the comedy genre ensures that filmmakers no longer need the outside markets of film festivals to finance this type of film to recoup their investments. It also expresses a certain satisfaction on the part of the Peruvian cinema-going public to laugh at the hegemonic image of their nation as presented by Marca Perú—and, in doing so, to forget some of the less savory aspects (historical, sociological, or both) of the Peruvian reality. The continuing national success of the series (and of comedies in general) among twenty-first-century Peruvian audiences in fact fulfills an implicit goal of Marca Perú: to brand the country to generate consumption, spurred on by the reframing of national identity. Whereas Cachín only has a red nose and becomes the Every-Peruvian individual in the film, the franchise has established something bigger, where the clownishly comedic red—and white—nose turns into an effective understanding of national identity.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

This and all translations from Spanish are mine. Granda, p. 23. Available at: . Cinema Tropical, Available at: . 5. In the introduction to Contemporary Peruvian Cinema: History, Identity and Violence on Screen (2018, p. 3), Sarah Barrow justifies her focus on films from the late 1980s to the mid 2000s because “these appear to set the tone and approach that all since then adopt. They were made during the period when the state was struggling to work out what its relationship with cinema should be…. [The] corpus of films taken together provokes debate about ‘national’ identity formation through officially sanctioned cultural products, and reflections on their wider circulation via the global festival circuit.” Significantly, as a cultural product with absolutely no state funding, ¡Asu Mare! bucked this trend in bypassing the typical distribution for such products. 6. Altiplano is actually a co-production between Belgium, France, Germany and the Netherlands, but with many Peruvian elements such as lead actor

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(Magaly Solier), location (Andes) and language (including Spanish and Quechua). 7. Gisela Cánepa Koch and Felix Lossio Chavez (2019) have edited La nación celebrada: marca país y ciudadanías en disputa, which takes apart various aspects of the branding campaign, including the chapter by Palacios Salier about Peru, Nebraska as a public relations moment. 8. To compare, a section from Vargas Llosa’s novel (1963) introducing the boys from the Diego Ferré neighborhood in Miraflores; notably, these boys present as significantly wealthier than the boys from ¡Asu Mare!, yet the scenes might be seen in communion with one another: “A little later he heard the voices of boys through the open window. The voices stopped, there was only the sound of a kick and the hum and slap of a ball as it bounced against the door. Then the voices again. … The blond boy was playing goalkeeper in the door of a garage. The dark boy kicked the brandnew soccer ball at him, shouting, ‘Stop this one, Pluto!’ … ‘Come on out,’ Pluto said. ‘We’ll kick some goals until the others come. Then we’ll get up a game’” (pp. 31–32). 9. The use of nostalgia as a way to forget the troubles of this period in ¡Asu Mare! may be contrasted sharply with another Tondero production, Jorge Carmona’s Av. Larco: la película. Another adaptation of a successful theatrical entity, this musical uses several locally produced rock songs from the period to tell a familiar love story among youth—but, this time, with the ubiquitous threat of the Shining Path prominently in the background. This foreshadows the conclusion where a bomb is set off at a concert (based on an actual event), killing the protagonist.

Works Cited All material originally written in Spanish translated by the author of this chapter. Altiplano, 2009. [film] Directed by Peter Brosens and Jessica Woodworth. Belgium: Ma.Ja.De Filmproduktion. ¡Asu Mare!, 2013. [film] Directed by Ricardo Maldonado. Peru: Tondero Films. ¡Asu Mare! 2, 2015. [film] Directed by Ricardo Maldonado. Peru: Tondero Films. ¡Asu Mare! 3, 2018. [film] Directed by Jorge Ulloa. Peru: Tondero Films. Av. Larco: La Película [Larco Avenue], 2017. [film] Directed by Jorge Carmona. Peru: Tondero Films. Barrow, S., 2007. Peruvian Cinema and the Struggle for International Recognition. Case Study on El destino no tiene favoritos (Alvaro Velarde 2003). In: D. Shaw, ed. 2007. Contemporary Latin American Cinema. Breaking into the Global Market. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Ch. 10.

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Barrow, S., 2018. Contemporary Peruvian Cinema. History, Identity and Violence on Screen. London: I.B. Taurus. Cánepa Koch, G. and Lossio Chavez, F., eds. 2019. La nación celebrada. Marca país y ciudadanías en disputa. Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Universidad del Pacífico. CENTRUM Centro de Negocios, 2011. La marca Perú. Nuestra Carta de Presentación en el Mercado Mundial. Strategia, 22, pp. 40–44. Chávez, R., 2019. Análisis de la taquilla del cine peruano del 2018. Cinencuentro [blog] 17 February. Available at: [Accessed 17 March 2019]. Cinema Tropical, 2013. ¡ASU MARE! Breaks All-Time Records in Peruvian History. Cinema Tropical [blog] 4 May. Available at: [Accessed 17 March 2019]. Couret, N., 2018. Mock Classicism. Latin American Film Comedy, 1930–1960. Oakland: University of California Press. Falicov, T., 2010. Migrating from South to North. The Role of Film Festivals in Funding and Shaping Global South Film and Video. In: G. Elmer, et al., ed. 2010. Locating Migrating Media. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Ch. 1. Fowler, C. and Helfield, G., eds. 2006. Representing the Rural. Space, Place, and Identity in Films about the Land. Introduction. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. La boca del lobo, 1988. [film] Directed by Francisco J. Lomardi. Peru: Inca Film. La familia Orozco [The Orozco Family], 1982. [film] Directed by Jorge Reyes. Peru: Bruma Films. Granda, C., n.d.. Cada canción . . . con su razón . . . Lima: La casa de Zenó Manué. Ice Age: Continental Drift, 2012. [film] Directed by Steve Martino and Mike Thurmeier. United States of America: Blue Sky Studios. Intimidad de los parques, 1965. [film] Directed by Manuel Antín. Argentina and Peru: Producciones Manuel Antín. León Frías, I., et al., 1965a. Intimidad de los parques. Hablemos de cine, 3, pp. 41–43. León Frías, I., et al., 1965b. Nace el cine nacional. Hablemos de cine, 3, p. 4. Magallanes, 2015. [film] Directed by Salvador del Solar. Peru: Péndulo Films and Tondero Films. Maldonado, R., 2019. Discussion About Carlos Alcántara and the Distribution of ¡Asu Mare! [Messenger Chat Exchange] (Personal Communication, 2 June 2019). Marca Perú, 2011. Documental Marca Perú 2011 (Versión Oficial de la Campaña Nacional) [video online] Available at: [Accessed 1 May 2019].

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Marca Perú, 2012. Loreto, Italia: Campaña Nacional de la Marca Perú 2012 [video online] Available at: [Accessed 1 May 2019]. Marca Perú, 2019. About Peru Brand [online] Available at: [Accessed 1 May 2019]. Los Shapis en el mundo de los pobres, 1986. [film] Directed by Juan Carlos Torrico. Peru: Asmont Producciones Filmicas S.A. Palacios Sialer, M., 2019. Marca Perú: un nuevo Perú en busca de nuevos peruanos. In: G. Cánepa Koch and F. Lossio Chavez, eds. 2019. La nación celebrada: Marca país y ciudadanías en disputa. Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Universidad del Pacífico. pp. 101–120. Patacláun, 1997–1999. [TV programme] Frecuencia Latina, Sundays 19.00. Poblete, J., 2016. A Sense of Humor and Society in Three Chilean Comedies: Taxi para tres, Sexo con amor and Super, Todo Chile adentro. In: J. Poblete and J. Suárez, eds. 2016. Humor in Latin American Cinema. London: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 247–266. Poblete, J. and Suárez, J., eds. 2016. Humor in Latin American Cinema. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Salinas, P., 2015. La reconfiguración cinematográfica de lo popular urbano en el Perú: el caso de Los Shapis en El mundo de los pobres. Alter/Nativas, 5 [online] Available at: [Accessed 1 May 2019]. Salinas, P., 2016. Muerte y resurrección del sujeto criollo en el cine peruano: un estudio de la película ¡Asu mare!. A Contracorriente, 14(1), pp. 250–269. Sánchez Prado, I., 2014. Screening Neoliberalism: Transforming Mexican Cinema, 1988–2012. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Solos [Alone], 2015. [film] Directed by Joanna Lombardi. Peru: Tondero Films. La teta asustada [The Milk of Sorrow], 2009. [film] Directed by Claudia Llosa. Peru and Spain: Vela Producciones. Vargas Llosa, M., 1963. La ciudad y los perros. Barcelona: Seix Barral. Vivas Sabroso, F., 2001. En vivo y en directo: una historia de la televisión peruana. Lima: Universidad de Lima.

CHAPTER 4

Peruvian Regional Cinema: Transtextuality, Gender and Violence in Bullying maldito, la historia de María Marimacha Emilio Bustamante

Introduction On the afternoon of 6 December 2015, during the Regional Film Festival of Ayacucho, a long line awaited the opening of the Cine Teatro Municipal, which advertised the film Bullying maldito, la historia de María Marimacha [Damned Bullying, the Story of María Marimacha] by director Mélinton Eusebio. The line went around the block, and many of the people in it had already seen the film but were eager to enjoy it again. The film was the latest success of so-called “regional cinema” in Ayacucho. According to its director, within six weeks of screenings at the

E. Bustamante (B) Universidad de Lima, Lima, Peru e-mail: [email protected] Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Lima, Peru

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 C. Vich and S. Barrow (eds.), Peruvian Cinema of the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52512-5_4

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theatre (property of the municipality of Huamanga, with only 320 seats), the film had already been seen by fifteen thousand viewers. Like other regional films that had previously enjoyed positive public response, Bullying maldito … displays connections to commercial genre cinema and to oral traditions. Following the idea of transtextuality as “all that which puts one text in relation, whether manifest or secret, with other texts”, (Genette 1989, pp. 9–10) in the following pages I will discuss not only the transtextual relations that link the film to American horror and B-movies and to the Peruvian legend of María Marimacha, but also those that link an important paratext1 —the film’s poster—to testimonies of women who suffered violence in Ayacucho during the internal armed conflict. Based on this analysis, I will argue that the film represents a critique of the violation of patriarchal norms regarding gendered behaviour, of the violence inflicted upon women during the internal armed conflict, and of the fear of feminine agency in Andean communities.

Peruvian Regional Cinema The term “Peruvian regional cinema” refers to films produced in departments of Peru other than Lima by producers and companies that are based and operate in such areas. Throughout the twentieth century, Peruvian film production was concentrated in Lima, the nation’s capital. Starting in December of 1996, however, a process of continuous and simultaneous production began in various departments of Peru (also called “regions”). The film that marked the beginning of this trend was Lágrimas de fuego [Tears of Fire] (1996), directed in Ayacucho by José Gabriel Huertas and Mélinton Eusebio. Made with a low budget, on analog video and with patchy editing, this feature film (about youth gangs) achieved great success in Ayacucho, where it filled the Cavero cinema (a commercial cinema with room for two thousand viewers) for several weekends. Since then, low-budget productions have been shot in almost all regions of Peru. In fact, two broad types of regional cinema might be distinguished: one that is centred on the production of feature films that combine mythical characters from oral traditions and contemporary themes with the conventions of genre cinema, and which is aimed at mass audiences; and another which is dominated by the production of short films and auteur cinema, which is aimed exclusively at exhibition opportunities in cultural centres and festivals. The first type is made for the

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most part in the departments of Ayacucho, Puno, Junín and Cajamarca; the second mainly in Lambayeque, La Libertad, Arequipa and Cusco. Bullying maldito … is part of that first type of regional cinema. The directors of this “genre regional cinema” typically come from peasant families that have migrated to cities; although they have received higher education in local universities or institutes, they lack academic instruction on audiovisual technique and their fondness for film has grown from commercial genre movies (melodrama, action, martial arts, horror) that they have seen through open-signal television or pirated DVDs, which have influenced their own filmmaking. Their productions are financed with their own funds and loans from family; the camerawork is not professional; the shoot takes place over the course of several months on weekends or in the participants’ spare time; the director is also the screenwriter, cameraperson, sound engineer, and later editor; and the screening takes place in municipal theatres, old cinemas that have been closed but are rented out and opened for the occasion, communal auditoriums, schools, arenas, sports grounds, or public plazas. Viewers usually pay to see these films, and this income allows the filmmaker to begin a tour through neighbouring communities and even, depending on the film’s success, to places far from the original premiere. To achieve this goal, the producers handle other tasks related to the film’s screening and distribution. They rent transportation (if they don’t have their own car), a projector and sound equipment, they print posters and flyers, and they drive through the streets with loudspeakers, inviting locals to see the film. Likewise, they go to local radio stations and television channels where they pay for ads or publicity interviews. A tour can last months or even years (one or two seasons per year); it ends when the public loses interest in the film or when it is pirated, a common practice that makes filmmakers very protective of their original material. The production of horror films gave a definitive push to this type of cinema, especially in Ayacucho. The first regional horror film was Qarqacha, el demonio del incesto [Quarqacha, The Demon of Incest] (2002) by Mélinton Eusebio. It spent ten weeks in Ayacucho at the Cine Teatro Municipal and the Cavero cinema, and then it toured through the cities of Huanta, Abancay, Andahuaylas, Huancavelica and Huancayo. The director calculates that a hundred thousand viewers saw it before it was pirated and uploaded to YouTube. This film marked the first onscreen appearance of the jarjacha (also called the qarqacha or jarjaria), a monster of Andean mythology: an incestuous comunero [an Andean

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communal laborer] by day and a being with the form of a llama or another animal at night, which stalks the community in search of victims to devour their brains. The film was followed, in several regions, by movies about other monsters of the Andean oral tradition, like pishtacos , kharisiris and condenados .2 Thirty-three regional horror films were produced between 1996 and 2015 (Bustamante and Luna Victoria 2017, vol. I, p. 148); more have been produced over the past four years. Regional horror films employ the conventions of Hollywood genre films, but also narrative resources inherited from orality. Mélinton Eusebio has recognized the debt his Qarqacha… owes to Dracula films (Bustamante and Luna Victoria 2017, vol. I, p. 110), just as the jarjacha of Palito Ortega Matute’s El demonio de los Andes [The Demon of the Andes] (2014) bears resemblance to the Wolf Man, and the condenado of Te juro amor eterno [I Swear to Love You Forever] (2010) by León Cáceres and Luis Gonzales is much like a cannibal zombie. The causal links in these stories’ structures, however, are weaker than in Hollywood films, emphasizing instead the accumulation of exciting situations in the style of the willakuy or Andean oral story. Besides horror films, other genres have been produced outside Lima. From 1996 to 2015, 146 regional feature films were screened, compared to 135 feature films from Lima (Bustamante and Luna Victoria 2017, vol. I, p. 149), thus regional production made up 46% of feature film production in Peru. Likewise, meetings and festivals of regional cinema were created, showing both genre and auteur films, and starting in 2006 the Ministry of Culture organized a prize exclusively for regional feature film projects. Nonetheless, until 2015 only twelve regional feature films had been shown in multiplexes (which make up the largest circuit of commercial distribution in the country), and regional cinema was still unknown in Lima, except to a few critics, cinephiles and producers. Although regional film production had increased by 2015, after that year there was a decline in the regions that had produced the most during the previous twenty years (Ayacucho and Puno). In Ayacucho, the closing of the Cavero cinema, converted into an evangelical church, limited the possibility of attracting the large crowds of past premieres; in Puno, the installation of a multiplex attracted an audience that started to turn its back on local films. In this context, the success of Bullying maldito … was surprising. Nonetheless, the past record of Mélinton Eusebio, whose previous films (Lágrimas de fuego, Quarqacha, el demonio del incesto and

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Almas en pena [Souls in Torment] (2005)) had been among the most successful of regional cinema, worked to its advantage.

The Director Mélinton Eusebio was born in 1977 in the peasant community of Pomacocha, Vilcashuamán province (Ayacucho), one of the areas most impacted by the violence of the internal armed conflict. A lawyer by profession, he is a self-taught filmmaker. As mentioned earlier, he was one of the directors of Lágrimas de fuego, the film that is acknowledged as having launched the regional cinema movement for Peru. In 2002, he premiered Qarqacha, el demonio del incesto to great success, and in 2005 he released another horror film, Almas en pena, which— he states—was his most successful film (Bustamante and Luna Victoria 2017, p. 103).3 The profits he made from both films allowed him to complete his legal studies and make forays into other businesses (he owns a hotel in Ayacucho and pizzerias in Ayacucho and Lima). Ten years after the premiere of Almas en pena, he returned to the cinema with Bullying maldito … whose production was not without problems.

Production, Screening and Distribution of Bullying maldito . . . The idea behind Bullying maldito … emerged in 2008, and Eusebio began writing the script in 2010. The production followed the established patterns of genre regional cinema. The funding was his own, and Eusebio himself organized a casting and a workshop with the chosen actors (almost all secondary school students). The shoot began halfway through 2011. By the end of 2012, more than 60% of the film was shot, under the title María Marimacha, la asesina de los Andes [María Marimacha, The Murderess of the Andes]. The culmination of the filming process was delayed for two reasons: a robbery of equipment and the premiere of another Ayacucho film with the same subject matter but a different title (María Marimacha, devuelve mi corazón [María Marimacha, Give Back My Heart] (2013), later retitled Marimacha, la encarnación [María Marimacha, the Incarnation], directed by David Acosta, Jorge Gaitán and Julio Oré). In a 2015 interview, Eusebio said the premiere of this other film led him to give “a twist” to the plot of his own film, which he finally titled

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Bullying maldito, la historia de María Marimacha. He specified that the twist consisted of adding a secondary character, but that he had imagined from the start that the protagonist would suffer bullying at school and would finally become a serial killer whose crimes would later be seen in a sequel (Bustamante and Luna Victoria 2017, vol. II, p. 109). The total cost of the production was 112,000 soles.4 The director also has pointed out that he made an important investment in publicity for the film. He acquired sponsors and placed ads on radio, television, and in print; likewise, his collaborators drove through the city by car with an eye-catching poster to promote the film. Bullying maldito … was first screened on October 31, 2015 at the Cine Teatro Municipal of Ayacucho, where it played until December; nonetheless, Eusebio sees this as a pre-premiere stage. He has indicated that the official premiere took place in April 2016 at the same theatre, where the film played for fourteen weeks; then, in 2017, it played for a second season of two months (October through November). Additionally, the film spent two seasons in the town of Huanta, also in Ayacucho, at the Mamá Clara secondary school, in May 2016 and October 2017. According to its director, to date (April 2019) it has been seen by more than 35 thousand viewers. The popular success of the film coincided with its recognition at local film festivals. In December 2015, Bullying maldito … was presented at the First Regional Film Festival of Ayacucho. In 2016, it received the prize for best picture at the Third National Film Festival of Huánuco, and it participated, with a new edition, in the Second Regional Film Festival of Ayacucho, where Eusebio received the prize for best director. In 2018, it was shown as a guest of the 22nd Lima Film Festival (organized by the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú) and in the Fourth Film Week of the Universidad de Lima; the same year, at the Fifth Trujillo Film Festival, an honorable mention was awarded to Nancy Quispe Yupanqui, who plays the film’s protagonist, for her performance. The film has not been shown commercially in any multiplex theatre.

The Legend of María Marimacha The starting point of Eusebio’s film is the legend of María Marimacha. The origin of this oral story is difficult to determine. Cecilia Rivera (1993, p. 99) concludes that it is of urban origin with Andean influence, but she cannot determine precisely how old it is. What can be confirmed is that

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the legend is commonly known throughout the country. In YouTube, we find short films made by fans from various regions that adapt the legend; in the comments, viewers mention having heard it as children. In general, this is a violent, exemplary tale that has been passed down for decades in homes and schools. The legend has several variations, but it typically goes as follows: María Marimacha is a girl who is given this nickname due to her supposedly “masculine” behaviour, since she enjoys playing boys’ games (macha is the feminine form of macho, referring to masculinity). One day, her mother gives her money and sends her to the market to buy a kilo of meat. On the way, María comes across some boys at play (marbles in some versions, football in others) and she joins in. They are placing bets on the game, and María loses, betting her mother’s money. No longer able to buy the meat, María goes to the cemetery and pulls out the heart of a fresh corpse she saw being buried. Back home, she gives the dead man’s heart to her mother, who cooks it unaware. Her mother eats it, noticing a strange taste; but María claims to have a stomachache in order to avoid having to force it down. That night, the dead man rises from his grave and goes to María’s house while she sleeps; he calls on her pitifully, “María Marimacha, give me back my heart”, and then he pulls out her own heart to take its place. In other versions, the dead man goes to the house while María’s mother and sister are at the cinema, and when they return, they find María’s dead body bleeding in a closet, or torn to pieces in the pots and pans of the kitchen. This cautionary tale warns not only of the dangers of disobedience, but also, fundamentally, of the dangers of transgressing established gender roles. María disobeys her mother by playing with the boys, thereby justifying her nickname “Marimacha”. In other words, she transgresses the heteropatriarchal norm of gendered behaviour. Rivera (1993, p. 97) wisely points out that the one who condemns this transgression is not the mother but the dead body, which belongs to a man rather than a woman; he adds that extracting the man’s heart can be equated to ripping out his masculinity. María is profoundly transgressive; the punishment she receives is therefore terrible, and, for the tale’s listeners, it affirms the need to observe socially established roles. This is, more or less, the story told in the short films that can be found on YouTube and in the Ayacucho feature film Marimacha, la encarnación. Nevertheless, while it is not the story of Bullying maldito … there

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is more than one parallel in the meanings implied by both stories, as we will see below.

Bullying maldito . . . The Other Story of María Marimacha Mélinton Eusebio states that he originally meant to present a faithful adaptation of the oral legend, but the premiere of María Marimacha: devuelve mi corazón (or Marimacha, la encarnación, as it was retitled) forced him to reconsider the story. Although Eusebio has minimized the “twist” he gave to the story, in reality the plot of his film is almost completely removed from that of the traditional tale. Among the adjustments the director incorporated into his film, he decided to highlight the issue of bullying, which until very recently was largely ignored in Peruvian society. During these first two decades of the twenty first century, issues such as bullying have become more socially acceptable for debate and challenge, and the choice made by Mélinton’s to include this in his film is just one example of this. Bullying maldito … takes place in a rural area, unlike the urban setting of the legend. María is a student in secondary school; she has a strong physique, she is very shy, she stays away from her female classmates, she is a victim of bullying, and she enjoys playing football. María’s first menstruation comes later than usual, to her surprise and fright, while she is bathing in a river. Her male classmates steal her clothes at that very moment, and she is forced to run naked into town, where she recovers her garments. María confesses to her female classmates that she has started bleeding, and they ask her if her mother has never spoken to her about this. The answer is obvious. One morning, María notices that hairs are growing on her lip and chin; terrified, she tries to pull them out with her fingernails and injures her face. María becomes more silent and distant than ever at school, until she is invited to play football. She agrees to play against the team led by Aquiles, the leader of the gang that harasses her. During the match, she scores two goals; Aquiles accuses her of playing dirty and challenges her, she punches him, and Aquiles falls to the ground. A brawl breaks out and is broken up by a teacher. Made aware of María’s behaviour at school, her mother scolds her, beats her, and throws her out of her home. Meanwhile, Aquiles suffers the ridicule of his former followers and says he will kill María. María and

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Aquiles come face to face again in an empty field. The fight is brutal, but in the end, Aquiles wins and rapes María, who later—apparently— commits suicide, throwing herself off a precipice. That night, Aquiles celebrates with his friends; but, once he is alone, María reappears (we do not know if she is alive or if she has become a supernatural being, since we only see her from behind with a sickle in her hand). Aquiles runs away, terrified, and María pursues him into the cemetery to kill him.

Parallels Between Legend and Film: Transgression and Critique Although the oral tale of María Marimacha and the plot of Eusebio’s film are clearly different, there are deep parallels between the two. Both deal with a young woman who transgresses the norms of “correct” gendered behaviour, and both young protagonists are solitary. (On the different versions of the legend, Rivera (1993, p. 96) reflects: “María Marimacha seems to be a rather lonely girl”.). In both stories, María “pilfers” her opponent’s masculinity: by stealing the dead man’s heart in the legend, and by punching Aquiles in the film (which leads to his losing the respect and leadership of his gang). In both stories, the punisher is the man because, as Rivera says, “the offence is against him” (1993, p. 96). The penalty is exemplary and bloody. María’s return in the film, after having apparently died, anticipates her vengeance, but it can likewise imply a critique against her: her transformation into a condenada [a female condenado]. Rivera (1993, p. 100) notes that, while the oral tale of María Marimacha “is Western in its origin and structure, it also has motifs of Andean origin”, and she points to the return of the dead to the world of the living as one such motif. In the original legend, the punisher is the one who returns; in Eusebio’s film, it is the transgressor. In Andean mythology, the condenado is a person who has died after committing a grave offence, is not accepted in the afterlife, and returns to Kay Pacha [this world], where he terrorizes the living (Fourtané 2015, p. 86). María’s return in the final scenes of Bullying maldito … can be interpreted as the return of an avenger or as the return of a condenada whose transgression has been so grave that she will not be able to rest in peace. However, a third reading is also possible: as a condenada, she threatens not only her rapist as an individual, but also—profoundly—the order of the world that rejected her.

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Transtextuality: Carrie and I Spit on Your Grave Although Eusebio’s film corresponds to the oral legend of María Marimacha on a deep level of meaning, from a narrative and stylistic point of view, it also establishes transtextual relations with certain American B-movies of the horror and thriller genres. Specifically, the sequence of late, traumatic menstruation with which the film opens recalls the subject matter and initial images of Brian De Palma’s Carrie (1976). María bears more than one resemblance to Carrie: she is a teenage victim of school bullying, she has been raised in a conservative environment, she has a conflict with her mother, she has not been educated to understand her sexuality, she does not know what menstruation is, and she experiences the transformations of her adolescent body as a form of monstrosity. Like Carrie, at the end of the film, María takes revenge on those who offended her. Nonetheless, there are clear differences in setting: Carrie’s story takes place in the urban United States of the 1970s while María’s takes place in the rural Andes of the present day: specifically in Ayacucho after the internal armed conflict. The menstruation sequence in Carrie takes place in the school showers, while in Bullying maldito … it takes place in a river, which gives rise to one of the film’s most powerful images: when we see a cloud of blood grow between María’s legs and then dye the water around her red, causing the teenager to panic (Fig. 4.1). This image recalls another American film, Meir Zarchi’s I Spit on Your Grave (1978), in which a character bleeds out while lying in the waters of a river. This is not the only similarity between this famous exploitation film and Bullying maldito …, as we shall see. I Spit on Your Grave tells the story of a young American writer (Jennifer Hills) who is raped by four criminals in a rural area where she is an outsider. The woman takes revenge, killing each of her attackers. The man in the river is one of the rapists, whom the avenger castrates with a motorboat engine. In Bullying maldito … the motifs of the outsider protagonist, masculine harassment and rape-and-revenge are all repeated. Other images from Bullying maldito … seem to be inspired not by the 1978 version of I Spit on Your Grave but by its 2010 remake, directed by Steven R. Monroe. After the young men steal Maria’s clothes, she runs naked through the forest and crosses a bridge. The camera shows her with a long, high-angle tracking shot, highlighting her solitude and humiliation. In the remake of I Spit on Your Grave, one scene shows Jennifer naked and trembling as she walks across a bridge after being

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Fig. 4.1 Maria’s menstruation in the river recalls a similar image in Carrie (De Palma 1976)

raped, the young woman does not cross the bridge, choosing instead to throw herself off it; nonetheless, the way Jennifer walks, with her arms outstretched in the shape of a cross, is similar to the position in which María throws herself into the abyss in Bullying maldito …. In both cases, the abusers take the protagonist for dead, and she returns from the dead to make them pay for their crimes. While in the 1978 version of I Spit on Your Grave, Jennifer reappears dressed in white, as if she were a ghost, to claim her first victim by hanging, it is clear that she is not really dead. In the 2010 version, on the other hand, there are doubts about whether she is alive or not: she takes on the appearance of a being from beyond the grave, she tortures her rapists before killing them, and she is presented as a monster. In both versions, the protagonist is seen as a transgressor by her attackers, who make this clear in their dialogues: she is an outsider who comes from a “wicked place” (the city, New York, where women show “libertine” behaviour), she wears “provocative” clothes (she is not demure), she drinks alcohol (neither accompanied by nor with the permission of a man), she gives orders (she is not submissive), and she is independent (she moves about alone, without masculine protection). Thus, the gang rape she suffers becomes a “penalty”. What’s more, in the 2010 remake, Jennifer humiliates one of her future rapists at his filling

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station by rejecting his advances and accidentally wetting him with petrol in view of his mocking friends. Although both films have been questioned for their supposed “feminism”—since the several minutes they both dedicate to representing, in detail, the abuse suffered by women and the violent revenge they later inflict upon their abusers seem designed to satisfy a primarily masculine audience, eager for sadistic spectacle—Viteo (2012, p. 132) suggests that the 1978 film is more complex, laying bare certain “negotiations” with the feminism of its time, while the 2010 film is clearly conservative. In the first, a woman who has been raped eliminates every representative of the patriarchy within a conservative space in order to move on, free, into the future; in the second, masculinity in crisis is destroyed by the epitome of an out-of-control “feminazi” (Viteo 2012, p. 131). These opposite meanings are related to the historical contexts in which each film was produced, and, from a narratological perspective, they are derived in part from the point of view chosen in each film after the protagonist’s rape. We might suggest that the 1978 film adopts an internal point of view with respect to Jennifer, such that we can be certain that she is still alive and we remain with her through her convalescence and the reconstruction of her personality (symbolized by a scene in which she glues together the pieces of her manuscript, torn apart by one of her attackers), while in the 2010 film, the point of view towards her is external (we do not see how she survives nor how she recovers, giving us the impression that she is a being from beyond the grave). Instead, the focus is internal with respect to her rapists, who suffer the tortures she inflicts upon them. As a result, in the first version we watch a human being take vengeance in what is, from her point of view, an act of justice; in the second, we watch the actions of a monster. In Eusebio’s film, María is not an outsider, but she is a strange person who transgresses the norms of gendered behaviour: she doesn’t spend time with other girls, she likes boys’ games, she is strong, she stands up for herself, and she humiliates the leader of the gang of boys, knocking him to the ground with one punch in front of his cronies. She is also “punished” for these actions through rape. Thus, there are various similarities to I Spit on Your Grave (1978 and 2010). Nonetheless, unlike these films, Bullying maldito … emphasizes, more than vengeance, María’s suffering for being “different”, the transgression entailed in her innocent behaviour, and the brutal punishment she suffers. The change in the film’s original title, from María Marimacha, la asesina de los Andes to Bullying maldito …,

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is very meaningful in this sense. The first title refers to the character as a victimizer; the second, as a victim. Consistent with the above, the film’s point of view is—most of the time—internal with respect to María, such that we share her fears and suffering; however, towards the end of the film, the point of view becomes external: we do not know if she has survived or if she has become a supernatural being (a condenada), she is depersonalized (she appears from the back, we do not see her face) and her behaviour recalls that of a serial killer or monster. Furthermore, after María’s apparent suicide, the story’s point of view switches to that of her rapist, Aquiles. In this sense, although Bullying maldito … initially seeks (and achieves) empathy with its protagonist, the ending comes closer to the remake of I Spit on Your Grave than to the original film. However, the issue is not so simple: in reality, María is not only perceived as a monster upon her return; throughout the film, she is perceived as such by herself and by her community, but we feel sympathy for her nonetheless.

Sympathy for the Monster In the genre of the fantastic, the monster is “the other” who, through its behaviour or its mere existence, puts social norms and natural laws at risk, provoking chaos and horror. As a result of her menstruation and the appearance of her facial hair, María sees her own body as monstrous. Her lack of education means she does not know these transformations are natural, so she assumes that they isolate her from the norm. As Mabel Moraña (2017, p. 231) points out, “the association between the feminine and the monstrous has a long history”, as the feminine body, like the monster’s, displays “a deviation from the norm”. The woman’s body is seen through the heteropatriarchal gaze as “lacking” and “mutilated”, but at the same time “prominent” (“liquid reality, dispersed, dilapidated”),5 and it is repressed by the norm that situates the masculine body as complete and ideal, associated with “spiritual and rational elevation” (Moraña 2017, p. 233). María has not fully internalized this norm, since she does not know how to adapt herself to it. Just as she cannot control her bodily changes, nor adjust them to the norm, she is unable to repress her energy (when she plays football or fights with the boys). Moraña states that the field of the monstrous is defined by traits foreign to femininity—including

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physical strength, violent behaviour, solitude and disregard for community—all of which are exhibited by María. She adds that in “cases in which the attributes of monstrosity are concentrated in the feminine figure, the effects of her actions on the world seem to be amplified, since the monstrous contradicts the established notions of sanctity, purity, and principle that are attributed to her”. In one of the film’s scenes, one of the town’s young women says that María is “bien rara” [quite strange] and that “le da miedo” [she scares her]. In the eyes of the community, María, la marimacha [the tomboy], is a monstrous being who causes revulsion and fear. Rivera States that Her Research into the Story of María Marimacha Led Her to Other Stories of Marimachas: Some are true stories, others are made up, although they’re assumed to be true, in which the fearsome, dangerous being is the marimacha. A poor, crazy, abandoned woman, with unusual behaviour, whom everyone either flees from or attacks with stones. (…) It is not her behaviour that makes her worthy of punishment: her very self is evil and will harm anyone who comes close to her. Marimachas are dangerous. (Rivera 1993, p. 100)

The marimachas of these stories have much in common with the María of Eusebio’s film: they are solitary, stigmatized, and feared. The difference with these stories, nonetheless, is that the narrative instance of Bullying maldito … adopts, almost throughout, the point of view of the stigmatized woman, creating empathy and qualities of tragedy around her character: pity (for her suffering and marginalization), admiration (for her physical fortitude) and fear at what might happen to her. María perceives herself as monstrous, the community rejects and fears her, but the viewer is placed by her side. At the end of the film, María’s return, with the appearance of a condenada, along with the change in focus, puts forth a new challenge for the spectator, which is left hanging for the possible sequel planned by Eusebio. If the monstrous, as Moraña (2017, p. 234) states citing Shildrick, “is a category that opens up to the transformation of ontological and epistemic models”, if the monster “functions as a signifier of the radical destabilization of identitary binaries”, and if the condenado is considered the monster par excellence of Andean tradition, will the next film continue to place the viewer by María’s side, or will it opt instead to tell its story from the status quo she so deeply threatens?

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A Disturbing Paratext Rivera states that she first heard the story of María Marimacha from a sixyear-old boy, and was shocked by its violence, especially in the end when María is torn to pieces by the dead man. The story the boy told me as a true event was so violent that it evoked the memory of massacres carried out by Shining Path and the armed forces, news reports, or violent horror films on television. (Rivera 1993, p. 89)

Although Rivera goes on to dismiss these sources and to mention that the boy’s mother passed on the story, it is likely that the internal armed conflict, news reports about it, and horror films shown on television exercised some influence on the version of the legend told by the boy. As we know, oral legends change as they are told. So, in the apparent palimpsest of Bullying maldito …, are there also traces of the internal armed conflict? I believe, even if they are not so evident in the text of the film, they are clear in the film’s main promotional poster, which shows an image that is not found in the film: María naked, kneeling in a cage, crying and with blood around her mouth, surrounded by four male characters in (school) uniforms, with backpacks and ski masks, who point and laugh at her. The image is set in a farmyard, we see animals and hills in the background. María appears humiliated, trapped, defeated and animalized (Fig. 4.2). The image of this poster (which was driven through the streets of Ayacucho, attached to the sides of a car whose driver advertised the film through a loudspeaker for two weeks), seems to refer, more than to bullying, to the many cases of sexual violence suffered by women detained and interrogated during the internal armed conflict, countless testimonies of which have been collected by the Informe Final de la Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación, or CVR [Final Report of the Commission of Truth and Reconciliation] (2003, pp. 206–384). The CVR determined that this was a case of “gender-based violence”, since it was directed against women simply for the fact of being women, and they concluded that this was a generalized practice of Peruvian state agents, especially in Ayacucho. Many of these testimonies describe gang rapes carried out by masked soldiers. On the other hand, we ought not forget that some women assumed leadership roles traditionally occupied by men within the Shining Path, and that many of them, when they were captured and recruited, were

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Fig. 4.2 This image recalls the testimonies from women who were raped by masked soldiers during the internal armed conflict

victims of rape. Like these women, María in Bullying maldito … suffers a bodily punishment for the fact of being a woman, but also for subverting gender roles. In the story of María Marimacha that so impressed Cecilia Rivera, María’s body was torn to pieces. This detail is not often repeated in other versions of the urban legend, and it seems to be conditioned by the context of the internal armed conflict; in fact, one of the testimonies of sexual violence collected by the CVR tells of a woman who is accused of being a terrorist after refusing a neighbour’s sexual advances. Days after her arrest, her remains are found scattered in a river (CVR 2003, p. 340). Rivera (1993, p. 101) also gives another interpretative clue: the dismembered body could evoke Andean stories “in which the image of the divided, torn-up body is used as a symbol of the triumph of the present power and order over one who disputes it or puts it in danger”. So, the woman-torn-apart is the raped woman who has dared to challenge the patriarchal order. But, as Rivera (1993, p. 101) indicates, in

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Andean tradition these pieces can be put back together, establishing “the possibility of return or recovery”. In the myth to which Rivera alludes (Inkarrí), the remains of the last Inca are scattered throughout the territory of the old empire after he is executed by the Spanish, but someday they will come back together and the Inca will reclaim his power and begin a radical transformation of the world. Rivera’s reference to dismemberment leads me to a daring interpretation of the end of Eusebio’s film, based on transtextuality. I Spit on Your Grave (1978) makes use of a metonymy: Jennifer’s rapists tear up her manuscript in front of her; she is a writer and the manuscript represents her: the raped woman is a woman-torn-apart. After the rape, Jennifer puts the pieces of her manuscript back together just as she physically and emotionally recovers; when she finishes, she is also ready to take revenge. In Eusebio’s film, we do not see the process of the victim’s reconstruction because the point of view changes to that of the victimizer, only to later surprise us with María’s “resurrection”. Nonetheless, if we take Bullying maldito … as a palimpsest and we scratch the surface of the text, underneath we find the woman-torn-apart, of I Spit on Your Grave (1978), who recovers and reconnects her pieces, as well as the versions of María Marimacha that feature dismemberments, and digging deeper we might even find the myth of Inkarrí. This is how, in Bullying maldito …, María could be seen, depending on the perspective we adopt, as returning like a condenada or like Inkarrí, that is, as an agent of chaos or of a new order. In conclusion, Bullying maldito … is a complex film that, through quotes and allusions to horror and exploitation films, as well as references to the sexual violence suffered by Andean women during the internal armed conflict evoked on its poster. It thus recalls the theme of the transgression of patriarchal norms that lie at the heart of the legend of María Marimacha, adopting—for most of the story—the point of the transgressor and victim, and leave her judgement as a monster or as the operator of a drastic social reordering in suspense. The reception the film has received from Andean audiences likely has to do with the transtextual relations it constructs, which viewers are able to recognize. In this way, by taking root in issues related to the local problems of its most immediate audience, the film is a useful instrument for reflecting on the imagination of Andean communities in post-conflict Peru. This chapter was translated by Arthur Dixon.

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Notes 1. I understand a paratext as a production that “surrounds”, “prolongs” and “presents” the text (Genette 2001, p. 7). 2. The pishtaco is a being foreign to the community that lies in wait for travellers under bridges or along curves in paths, attacking them and sucking the fat from their bodies to sell it to churches, factories, or pharmaceutical businesses. The kharisiri is the pishtaco of the Aymara people. The condenado is a person who, after death, is not accepted in the afterlife due to his offences, and who must return to the world of the living, where he claims his victims. For more on this subject, see Morote Best (1988) and Ansión (1987). 3. The director has said that it garnered 300 thousand viewers whereas he only invested 30 thousand soles, around nine thousand dollars, in the project. 4. This equates to around 33,634 dollars, broken up as follows: 12,000 on pre-production, 70,000 on production and 30,000 on post-production (information provided by the filmmaker in 2019). 5. Moraña (2017, p. 231) highlights, specifically, “the presence of menstrual blood” as one of the feminine traits “traditionally represented through the codes of monstrosity.”

Works Cited Almas en pena [Souls in Torment], 2005. [film] Directed by Eusebio Mélinton. Peru: Ahora o Nunca Films. Ansión, J., 1987. Desde el rincón de los muertos: el pensamiento mítico en Ayacucho. Lima: Gredes. Bullying maldito, la historia de María Marimacha [Damned Bullying, the Story of María Marimacha], 2015. [film] Directed by Mélinton Eusebio. Peru: Cine cultura producciones. Bustamante, E. and Luna Victoria, J., 2017. Las miradas múltiples: el cine regional peruano. Volumes I and II. Lima: Universidad de Lima. Carrie, 1976. [film] Directed by Brian de Palma. USA: Red Bank Films. Comisión de la Verdad y la Reconciliación (CVR), 2003. Informe final. Lima: CVR El demonio de los Andes [The Demon of the Andes], 2014. [film] Directed by Palito Ortega Matute. Peru: Perú Movie. Eusebio, M., 2019. Personal correspondence with author. [Facebook message] (Personal communication, 27 April 2019). Fourtané, N., 2015. El condenado andino: estudio de cuentos peruanos. Lima: CBC, IFEA. Genette, G., 1989. Palimpsestos: la literatura de segundo grado. Madrid: Taurus.

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Genette, G., 2001. Umbrales. México D.F.: Siglo XXI editores. I Spit on Your Grave, 1978. [film] Directed by Meir Zarachi. USA: Barquel Creations. I Spit on Your Grave, 2010. [film] Directed by Steven R. Monroe. USA: Cinetel Films. Lágrimas de fuego [Tears of Fire], 1996. [film] Directed by José Gabriel Huertas and Mélinton Eusebio. Peru: Wari film producciones. Marimacha, la encarnación [María Marimacha, the Incarnation], 2014. [film] Directed by David Acosta, Jorge Gaitán and Julio Oré. Peru: 666 Films. Moraña, M., 2017. El monstruo como máquina de guerra. Madrid: Iberoamericana. Morote Best, E., 1988. Aldeas sumergidas: cultura popular y sociedad en los Andes. Cusco: Centro de Estudios Rurales Andinos Bartolomé de las Casas. Qarqacha, el demonio del incesto [Quarqacha, the Demon of Incest], 2002. [film] Directed by Mélinton Eusebio. Perú: Ahora o nunca Films. Rivera, C., 1993. María Marimacha. Los caminos de la identidad femenina. Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Te juro amor eterno [I Swear to Love You Forever], 2010. [film] Directed by León Cáceres and Luis Gonzales. Peru: Nemfuis Films. Viteo, K. A., 2012. Day of the Woman? Feminism & Rape-Revenge Films. MA. University of Western Ontario. Available at: [Accessed 8 March 2019]

CHAPTER 5

Creativity and Perseverance in a Precarious Context: Filmmaking in Ayacucho Between Artistic Vision and Lived Reality Martha-Cecilia Dietrich

Introduction “One, two, three. Camera rolling. Action!”1 The film set of La maldición del Inca [The Curse of the Inca] (unreleased), directed by Martin Ccorahua and Lucho Berrocal, is buzzing. Gato, the costume designer, is busy painting Inca soldiers with red food colourant while other actors are testing their armour. At the end of the scene, they will all be dead, killed at the hands of Rumisunqu, the Inca rebel who turned against his emperor for love. This is according to the script, but it is late, it is hot, and for the past two hours, the crew has been trying to get a particular shot of Marisol, the female lead actress, stumbling across the corpses of the Inca soldiers. With fast-moving cloudy skies, the light keeps changing, making this pivotal scene a near impossibility for cameraman Carlitos to record properly. The location is thirty minutes away from the city of Huamanga

M.-C. Dietrich (B) University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 C. Vich and S. Barrow (eds.), Peruvian Cinema of the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52512-5_5

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and Ccorahua has hired a van and a driver to bring everyone out for this evening. The clock is ticking, and there are another three scenes to shoot. “Whatever we have, will do”, Berrocal utters, unconvincingly. “Martin’s wife won’t allow another (costly) day like this”, he adds jokingly, but he means it. Ayacuchean director-duo Ccorahua and Berrocal had been working on this script for seven years. Together they wanted to tell a story of love and betrayal during the great Inca empire resulting in its collapse with the arrival of the Spanish invaders. A tale of human weakness that marks the beginning of a society reigned by violence and injustice. First, the story appeared to Ccorahua in his dreams, and together with Berrocal, they later turned it into a fantasy story which, according to them, local audiences had been waiting for. The situation described above attests to the precarious working conditions of filmmaking in the Andes, which marked my experience of fieldwork with directors in the department of Ayacucho.2 The need to navigate technological proficiency, to deal with economic and time pressures stemming from a lack of funding and institutional support, and to respond to expectations from family and friends, make this creative endeavour a particularly challenging one. And yet, there is no shortage of filmmakers in Ayacucho. In this chapter, I look behind the scenes of this Andean cinema in-the-making. Having accompanied the production of the film La maldición del Inca in its eighth year, I assess some of the challenges, disappointments and rewards of making cinema in this context. Foregrounding modes of production, circulation, and reception, I explore processes of cultural representation and socio-cultural negotiations through fictional storytelling practices. I ask: What is the significance of making cinema for these filmmakers and their audience? What stories do these films tell? How do notions of contemporary Ayacuchean identity, as articulated in the film analysed here, relate to a present local social reality? Rather than pursuing an understanding of what is considered Ayacuchean in a region as diverse, complex, fragmented and ever-changing, I focus on the film crew’s creative appropriations, cultural translations and performances of regional identities amidst a multiplicity of influences and narratives.

“Our Cinema” “Cinema does not earn you any money” is a common lament among Ayacuchean filmmakers. If anything, operating in a limited commercial context that is highly dependent on a local market, stakeholders recoup

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only a small portion of their privately invested money through public screenings. In some cases, they are even likely to make a loss. Labour, time and creative effort, however, remain largely unacknowledged. Despite a keen interest in locally produced films, which manifests in packed movie theatres when they are finally screened, public support during the production process is modest. In 2006, what was then the national board of cinematography (CONACINE) initiated its first competition to support projects exclusively from the Peruvian provinces as a response to claims that regional filmmakers were disadvantaged in terms of educational training and access to production and distribution networks (Bustamante and Luna Victoria 2017, p. 211). The problem is that these contests are highly competitive, and a majority of proposals are rejected, often because filmmakers lack the expertise to craft a funding bid. Nevertheless, films continue to be produced in Ayacucho, with or without a budget. When I asked Ccorahua why he made films despite it being so unprofitable, he responded: “at least I can say I have done something in my life for which I will be remembered. I have made my own cinema. […] When I go to the villages and I say, ‘this is my film’, they treat me with respect” (Ccorahua in an interview with the author, 2018). The respect and admiration for the artistic craft of filmmaking is notable. The concept of “our” cinema demonstrates the desire for a cultural re-valorization of Ayacuchean Quechua-speaking people, in the context of relationships of power and representation experienced as discriminatory and unequal. The British social anthropologist Alfred Gell argued that artworks mediate social relations, that they are “purposeful extensions, or agents, of people” (1998, p. 20). Being able to create moving images of people, places, and practices using sophisticated technology (requiring access and training) usually attributed to the western white man, elevates the collective “we”. An art object can actively shape interactions or initiate “causal sequences’’ (Gell 1998, p. 16) between its makers, users, patrons, audience, and indeed, itself, that is, it can exert agency. Indeed, tensions between Berrocal, Ccorahua and myself that revealed these inequalities became a prominent theme during fieldwork as my research involved the making of a documentary. In 2016, my crew and I started shooting the documentary Horror in the Andes (2019), intending to explore how filmmakers in Ayacucho appropriate global cinematic languages to tell local histories. Filmmaking here was a point of engagement and allowed for a creative partnership through which to develop and share the painful adventure of making films. The presence of the additional camera also

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prompted us to discuss the ways in which we perceive the effects of global inequalities on interpersonal relationships. Berrocal and Ccorahua, both directors from Ayacucho, initially agreed to be accompanied by our crew out of curiosity. They later told me that I was the first woman they saw working with two white male crew members who were trained in the craft of camera and sound recording, but Berrocal ended the conversation saying “it seems like nowadays, everything is possible”. Debates about the quality of our equipment and professional training compared with theirs, the differences of cultural politics in Peru and Europe, and which stories truly mattered, were a constant reminder of the difficult relationship between “us” and “them”. The presence of two crews, us filming them, and them filming their actors, evoked a politics of gazing, a way of looking, of looking away and being looked at, all which needs to be situated within broader historical processes in the construction and reproduction of power difference. Questions about who holds the camera, what stories we tell and how, pushed us to reflect not just on epistemological and aesthetic imperatives, but also on the circumstances and conditions that guide vision and creation—theirs and ours (Fig. 5.1).

Fig. 5.1 Filming La maldición del Inca (Berrocal and Ccorahua unreleased)— crew with Carlitos (camera centre), Lucho and Martin (from centre to right)

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Cinema in Ayacucho: A Place in Motion In recent decades the Peruvian Andes have seen a continuous influx and circulation of pirated blockbuster films. Electrical suppliers sell the latest television sets, DVD players, and projectors. Holly-, Bolly- and Nollywood products, as well as global independent cinema are available at local market stalls and street sales, making home cinema or rentable screening rooms called “Mini Cinemas” or “Cine TVs” the most popular form of everyday entertainment. As elsewhere in the world, global cinema has entered the spheres of the public and private. Traces of this cinematic expansion can be found in many places. Gregorio, a truck driver we met supplying Huamanga citizens with fruit and vegetables from the Amazon, named his vehicles—according to power and performance—after his Hollywood idols Jackie (Chan), Chuck (Norris) and (Sylvester) Stallone. Huamanga has a fan-club for Shah Rukh Khan with 166 Facebook followers who celebrate the Bollywood actor, producer and television personality. Potions at the central market’s “health and magic section” carry labels with still shots from African witchcraft films, and the hairdresser at the edge of the Santa Clara market offers fringe cuts in Jennifer Lawrence style. This global flow of stories and ideas is not a recent phenomenon in the Andes, but rather a testament to the region’s connectedness and constant transformation. To be precise, film culture in this region celebrates almost one hundred years of existence. The first cinema (named “Cáceres”) was built in 1929 in Huamanga. In the 1960s, there were four cinemas, three in Huamanga and one in Huanta, which screened national newsreels and international film productions. A decade later, the first independent cineclubs opened for the exhibition of national and, occasionally, local productions (Bustamante and Luna Victoria 2017, pp. 256–258). The increase in exhibition spaces also led to growing audience numbers, particularly from urban contexts. The rising competition of films available on VHS and DVD in the 1980s and 90s, together with the growth of an informal market of pirated movies, resulted in the decline of sizeable collective screening venues. In 2008, the last remaining cinema, Cavero, located in Huamanga’s city centre, gave way to the Pentecostal church and its growing number of followers, much to the frustration of local film producers. This, however, did not mean that the thirst for cinema disappeared. Instead, audiences relocated to homes, community centres, small screening rooms, and personal computers. Today, Ayacuchean

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filmmakers are left with the municipal theatre as the only “official” mainstream exhibition space for local productions. Until the 1990s, Ayacucheans were primarily consumers rather than producers of films. Ayacuchean directors started making films in the late 1990s when a group of eight enthusiastic filmmakers started using affordable video and new editing technology. These young directors were hungry for “shootable” stories, and they found their repertoire in regional histories of violence and conflict as well as in Andean myths and legends (Quinteros 2011). Those I interviewed often explained that their stories came from unresolved issues and fragments of troubling memories that occasionally reached the surface in dreams or moments of introspection. With a few exceptions, Ayacuchean filmmakers grew up in Huamanga as part of an emerging middle-class. Their parents had been farmers, labourers, artisans, or small traders, and many had fled their villages due to the political turmoil and violence of the internal armed conflict (1980–2000). In the 1970s and ’80s, when many of today’s directors were children or young teenagers, political life in Latin America, even in more remote corners like the department of Ayacucho, was dominated by a polarized wartime grammar of revolutionary socialism opposed by one of violent anti-communism (Warren 2006, p. 214). In the late 1970s, the divisions in the region had taken over: on one side, there were peasant groups, teachers’ unions, artists and intellectuals, and on the other, a political elite, an influential Catholic clergy and wealthy oligarchs (Poole and Rénique 1991; Degregori 2010). Amidst this polarized landscape, the Maoist-inspired Communist Party, also known as Shining Path, proposed violence as a solution to the country’s socio-political problems. Initially, this appealed to many, particularly to a dissatisfied peasantry and young intellectuals (Degregori 1990, 2010, pp. 173–194). But Shining Path soon lost its public support, not least because of the insurgents’ excessive use of violence against civilians, their authoritarianism as well as their ideological positions “at odds with the values and traditions of local communities” (Rénique and Lerner 2019, p. 63). Three successive governments responded to the insurgent groups by sending the armed forces and paramilitary units to fight a brutal counterinsurgency war that affected a mainly rural Andean population. With an estimated 69,280 people killed (CVR 2003, Annex 2, p. 1), Ayacucho was considered the region most severely hit by both insurgent and state violence claiming almost a third of total casualties. For nearly two decades, curfews,

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disappearances, fear and uncertainty shaped Ayacucheans’ experience of everyday life. As filmmaker Ccorahua explained: “Rumors circulated about how the police and military forces treated their prisoners, how they tortured them, and what they did with the bodies. At the same time, people were scared of the Shining Path members, too, since people were attacked if they did not comply with their requests for food, shelter and information. The Shining Path recruited children by force and publicly executed persons they deemed traitors to their cause. The streets were full of these horror stories”. The production of the first Ayacuchean films took place shortly after Shining Path’s defeat in 1992. Movies such as Lágrimas de fuego [Tears of Fire] (1996) by José Gabriel Huertas, and Dios tarda pero no olvida [God Takes His Time, but He Doesn’t Forget] (1996), Sangre inocente [Innocent Blood] (2000) and El rincón de los inocentes [The Corner of the Innocent] (2005) by Palito Ortega Matute, were home-made, low-budget action-dramas inspired by the filmmakers’ own lived experiences during the conflict and its aftermath (Cabrera 2007; Bustamante and Luna Victoria 2017). From the early 2000s, the dominance of action drama gave way to the horror genre. Films based on popular myths and legends featured non- or post-human beings and supernatural forces. These tales were commonly recounted as bedtime stories at a time when the majority of the population had no electricity and no TV, computers or phones. Family members would gather by candlelight to tell stories of demons, monsters and lost souls, of God and the holy spirit on earth. Films like Qarqacha, el demonio del incesto [Qarqacha, the Demon of Incest] (2002) by Melinton Eusebio, and La maldición de los Jarjachas 1 & 2 [The Cures of the Jarjachas 1 & 2] (2002 and 2003) by Palito Ortega Matute, Pishtaco (2003) by Jose Antonio Martinez Gamboa, or El misterio del Kharisiri [The Mystery of the Kharisiri] (2004) by Henry Vallejo, became local hits. As Castro Pérez writes, Andean horror films “offered new forms of expression that revisited its myths, legends, and rich oral traditions” (2016, p. 16). Popular horror stories were commonly viewed as harmless fun, and celebrated as cultural heritage. Yet, some also revealed a society deeply fractured by race, sex and enormous economic inequality (Weismantel 2001, p. xxi). One example is the figure of the Pishtaco (or Kharisiri), a bogeyman, usually depicted as a vampire-like white man. In some written records, he plunders the fat from peoples’ bodies, disembowelling, dismembering and raping indigenous women. In some versions, the fat he extracts is used to build church bells or factory machines, while in others, he devours his

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victim’s brains. For Mary Weismantel, the Pishtaco reveals a fantasy of the white man that frightens Indians, women and the poor, “for it evokes their own vulnerability to the predatory actions of the powerful” (2001, p. xxii). While Ayacuchean films such as El rincón de los inocentes deal with experiences of violence more literally, other movies featuring characters like the Pishtaco, the Qarqacha, evil spirits or condenados [lost souls], incorporate elements of experienced violence into the plot of a fantasy story. This violence, however, is not necessarily rooted in the conflict. These films usually revolve around an individual or group, who, through their behaviour, disrupt social order and, in doing so, unleash supernatural forces. Acts of violence and evil then threaten the community until the monster is obliterated. In this sense, real concerns about specific issues of communal living like incest, exploitation of the environment or wilful property damage as well as physical violence, are imagined and resolved through spiritual or fantastic creatures. A common theme that connects the genres of action drama (based on real-life events) and horror fiction is the pervasiveness of a weakened or treacherous state (Rasmussen 2017). Perceptions like these are articulated by characters like a lone police officer incapable of defending the community (e.g. Uma, cabeza de bruja [The Witch’s Head] (2009) by Lalo Parra) or has joined evil forces (e.g. Dios tarda pero no olvida). In films like these, this absence of legitimate state authorities creates moral corrosion and a vacuum to be filled by someone or something willing to assume the task of providing justice and order. According to anthropologist José Carlos Cabrejo (2010, p. 53), supernatural forces enact just punishments that, as he argues, are otherwise unavailable: “In a way, these films reflect a kind of compensation, that sublimates a series of dissatisfactions that belong to a social disorder in this region, followed by sanctions that stem from the supernatural, from another world that is able to re-establish an equilibrium that does not exist in our reality” (2010, p. 53). La maldición del Inca connects the genres of action drama and horror fiction through this common theme of state failure. The story is set during the invasion of the Spanish conquistadors, an actual moment in history. But this event is redirected into an alternative future with the help of supernatural forces. The story of the main character, Rumisunqu, a highlevel officer of the Inca army begins before the arrival of the Spaniards. Issues of love and betrayal between Rumisunqu and the Inca present one of the “causes” of the downfall of the Inca empire. But Rumisunqu is cursed to return from the dead five hundred years later, where he finds his

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people deprived, neglected and abandoned. He overcomes his personal grief and resentment and turns into the long-awaited Inca hero who returns to his people to set history right. In this film, distant histories of violence and injustice are reimagined through the power of magic and divine intervention. Fiction here seems not only to be a product of a social reality (Kirsch 2002, p. 43) in which the directors perceive the legacies of the colonial era to be at the root of social conflict, but also provides a space in which the relationships between social actors of the past, present and future are open for negotiation. In making this film, the directors’ creative vision did not seek to explain the present through the past, but to imagine an alternative future. Putting the directors’ artistic vision into practice, however, has confirmed a precarious lived reality in which I decided to make the filmmaking itself the object of my analysis.

The Return of the Inca: Between Creative Vision and Reality “The Inca is back!” Berrocal exclaimed before ordering the camera to roll. In the Andean highlands, stories of pre-Hispanic cultures and their resistance against the Spanish invaders are reviving. With Ayacucho being remembered as one of the bastions in the fight against the Spanish, famous rebel figures such as Micaela Bastidas, María Parado de Bellido and José Gabriel Condorcanqui (better known as Túpac Amaru), are once more becoming icons of Andean identity and symbols for political resistance (Walker 2014, p. 277). It is also their stories that inspired the making of La maldición del Inca. During the internal armed conflict, Ayacucho had once more been at the centre of violent confrontations. It was here where the Shining Path initiated its war against the Peruvian state. A recurring association of the region with political violence and rebellion has contributed to a general desire in Ayacucho to imagine Ayacucheans in other terms. Ccorahua explained to me that: The horrors our people experienced during the conflict created a longing for unity and success among Ayacucheans, which was inspired by our forefathers, the Incas. They were far more advanced than other civilizations in Europe and North America. With skill, they created and ruled an empire that reached from the north of Chile to Ecuador. […] And look at us today, we are a joke. […] With our film, we want to create the Incas in our image and tell their story ourselves. (October 2016)

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Nostalgia and a sense of lamentation towards an “alternative future” (Flores Galindo 1988, p. 248), stolen by the hand of the Spanish and by the violent conflicts that followed, pervade the narratives in which many Ayacucheans like Martin see themselves. But in the story of their film, the Inca gets a second chance. The first scene of the film shows Rumisunqu (played by Alberth Tenor) commanding the imperial army. Soon his life takes a dramatic turn when the Inca emperor claims Ccori, the woman he loves, to be his. Feeling betrayed by the man he loyally served, the situation escalates when Ccori refuses to swear her love to the emperor. The offended emperor orders the sacrifice of Ccori to the gods. With a broken heart, Rumisunqu curses the entire Inca civilization. The next scene shows the arrival of the Spanish, marking the beginning of an era of terror. Five hundred years later, Rumisunqu awakens in present-day Ayacucho to a group of students plundering his grave. Outraged by what has become of his people, Rumisunqu decides to break the curse and fight the injustices of the modern world. “The story”, Berrocal explained, “is based on an Andean tale, and since we were children, we dreamed that one day the Inca would return to save us”, This “Andean utopia” refers us to what is the myth of the Inkarrí3 . This discursive resistance against the Spanish invaders is a fundamental part of a shared Andean history, not necessarily in its historical dimension, but in its symbolic and affective qualities. Referring once again to La maldición del Inca, this narrative gains meaning mainly when told in a general climate of disempowerment and frustration with national as well as local politics. In this context, the act of telling stories about governing and governed is a claim of ownership over history, and an attempt to shape how its content is perceived. But while storytellers actively create a place for themselves in the world, storytelling is also the foundation of the self (Jackson 2002). Through making this particular story into a film, directors Ccorahua and Berrocal wanted to be agents in changing the perception of Ayacucheans from being victims of history to becoming its heroes. Rumisunqu’s character signifies the possibility of change, an alternative way of imagining a contemporary reality. Fiction serves to rework a historical past and offer a scenario for an alternative future by creating a space in which, for instance, justice may not be an exception, but the rule. Rumisunqu’s story draws attention to contemporary social issues brought about by a moral crisis rooted in the inefficiency or absence of guiding authorities. Moreover, by suggesting that the actors speak in

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Quechua, except for the Spanish invaders and the present-day criminals, Berrocal and Ccorahua envisioned presenting a return to Andean people’s “authentic” cultural, pre-hispanic roots as a form of solution to the problems of the present. However, soon after the production began, it became apparent that since hardly any of the actors spoke Quechua, they experienced problems memorizing their lines. Key actors had to be substituted, or alternatively, their text significantly reduced. Due to a lack of funding which would have allowed to dub crucial dialogues in post-production, some parts of the film initially scripted in Quechua will remain in Spanish. According to the last census of the National Institute of Statstics and Informatics (INEI) from 2017,4 Ayacucho is a federal district in which more than half of the population consider themselves “ethnic Quechua”, meaning they identify as Quechua through their ancestry, customs and traditions (Andrade Ciudad 2019, p. 45). The census also revealed that few of those identifying as Quechua actually speak the language. But despite a hegemonic discourse that foresees the slow decline and eventual extinction of languages like Quechua, numbers seem to be rising. Bilingual education, more effective diversity policies and initiatives that promote cultural revitalization from within civil society may be showing impact (Andrade Ciudad 2019, p. 45). Ccorahua and Berrocal, both in their mid-forties, told me that they had initially assumed their cast could speak Quechua until shooting began. The actors, predominantly in their early twenties, spoke of parents who chose to teach them Spanish before Quechua at a time when racial stereotyping defined social mobility. The myth of the “unclean”, “primitive” and “immoral” indigenous person, in addition to the racial profiling during the conflict, cultivated a sense of cultural inferiority among Quechua people, with some even denying that they spoke Quechua at all. In addition, in my conversations with the crew I found that racial discrimination was considered to be a Peruvian trait: “we Peruvians are racist”, was a common refrain. Experiences of stigma was linked to knowing and not-knowing Quechua, but also a noticeable change in perception among younger generations many of whom consider themselves both Peruvian and Quechua while regretting not growing up with the Quechua language like some of their peers. Despite learning to distance themselves from their indigenous identity while growing up, actors and members of the crew showed enthusiasm for actively changing existing ideas by celebrating the Quechua language as a symbol of a shared cultural identity among Ayacucheans. They consider themselves part of a

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new generation that is proud about speaking Quechua as evidenced by posts and comments in Quechua on social media platforms. Extending Quechua use in urban contexts has resulted in a general resignification of what Quechua cultural identity is. Quechua language platforms,5 music videos of famous Quechua pop singers like Renata Flores,6 and local bands playing in Quechua are further signs of this change in perception. Many of the crew members have also shown their support for indigenous people’s struggles in Bolivia and Ecuador, sharing videos, posters, and news feeds. This collective endeavour emphasizes the construction of a shared Andean identity and sense of belonging where indigenous content is reinforced and celebrated. To further develop this notion of cultural re-identification, the directors’ intention was also to elevate Rumisunqu through their approach to his representation in the film. For instance, positioning the camera at the lowest possible angle would create a majestic image of him as tall, secure, and manly. In the film’s first half, Rumisunqu jumps from trees, crosses torrential rivers, walks through fire, and fights a group of six armed soldiers with his bare hands. However, later in the film, Rumisunqu wears a golden mask because the actors playing his role had had enough of the hardship and asked to be substituted. As amateur actors with no assistance from professional stuntmen, Rumisunqu’s feats became too hard to perform at all, let alone gracefully. José Luis Vivanco, the actor playing Rumisunqu at the time of our filming, almost passed out when he walked through fire eight times before Berrocal decided the take was “usable enough”, though he was still far from happy. “You have to run like a man! Like an Inca … you have to be impressive!” he indicated to José Luis. The apparent, or simply human, weakness of the actors contrasted with the hyper-masculine image and almost supernatural strength of Rumisunqu, something that the directors were trying to recreate with their limited resources. As a pervasive feature of Peruvian popular stories, the film’s superhero image of the Inca idealizes masculine prowess. As Victor Vich has explained in the case of Peruvian street comedians, this hypermasculinity that constructs the protagonists in stories “of the street” is associated with complex mechanisms of social power and domination that reproduce a particular social order (2010, p. 127). Rumisunqu, in Berrocal’s eyes, is a hero capable of fulfilling the promise of justice and change. Ironically, this vision became impossible for his actors to achieve within the constraints of the precarious means of production that were available to them (Fig. 5.2). Bringing story and characters to life through the use of the latest technology was a priority for the directors, even if this meant having

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Fig. 5.2 Film still from La maldición del Inca (Berrocal and Ccorahua unreleased) featuring the powerful Inca

to build the equipment themselves, using instruction manuals from the internet. They worked out how to record the battle between the Incas and the Spanish through air shots utilizing a crane that they built after three months of work. Shortly after having completed building this crane, someone working for a television station in Lima showed interest in buying it, offering a good price. Because Ccorahua and his family needed money to pay bills that had accumulated as a result of the production, Ccorahua sold the crane before even using it. Frustrated, he blamed life and the burden of making films without support. Weeks later, the scene of the confrontation, which Ccorahua had so vividly imagined as looking like the final battle in Lord of the Rings, was shot at the ancient Inca ruins of Vilcashuaman using another older and less workable crane. The shots were shaky and unusable. Ccorahua and Berrocal agreed that this scene needed to be shot again. Meanwhile, everyday life had taken over once more, and the actor playing the last Rumisunqu resigned from the job. At the time of writing this chapter in early 2020, La maldición del Inca is still a few scenes away from completion.

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Conclusion Ayacucho’s oral storytelling tradition has found in audio-visual language an effective means of expression. Rooted in the social, political and spiritual life worlds of the Andes, the relatively short but diverse history of cinema-making in Ayacucho shows that this is a locally situated practice as much as it is a means for creative re-invention. By being accessible to a broader population (as opposed to text-based media), fictional filmmaking allows for an artistic exploration and visualization of Ayacuchean self-images, socio-cultural concerns and real-life experiences. In a region that has long been understood as marginal, the artefact of film has become a valuable site of the negotiation of memories and the creation of new imaginative horizons of a shared past, present, and future. At the same time, my ethnographic project also shows the difficulties faced by filmmakers when they aim to make films for commercial audiences. General limitations in terms of training, infrastructure, and funding reveal regional cultural politics that favour profitable arts and crafts-making for tourists rather than a creative industry for local audiences. And yet, despite this precarity, filmmaking in Ayacucho is more popular than ever. Affordable recording and editing technology, as well as a growing filmmakers’ scene that meets in bars, and financial support through polladas [private fundraising events for projects], contribute to creating a sense of community that helps overcome persistent precarious conditions. Through my description of some of what happened during the shooting of La maldición del Inca, I have tried to show how reliant these filmmakers are on the goodwill of family and friends and how constrained they are by their budget limitations. As co-director and producer, Cchorahua put vast amounts of his own money into the project, but still this was far from adequate for completion. The gaps between creative vision and lived reality became most apparent (and many times disruptive) during the shoot. Substandard equipment, a lack of funding and infrastructure, unequal access to expert knowledge, amateur actors, and insufficient time to commit to the craft of filmmaking, have contributed to the fading of Ccorahua’s and Berrocal’s dream over time. Their story resembles that of many independent filmmaking endeavours in Peru and beyond, where the challenges in production seem to dominate and overcome the creative experience. This reflects a social and political reality in which artistic practices can or cannot exist, and is the story of a

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mostly failed film endeavour, rarely discussed in film-related studies. The challenges directors and crew faced during the production also meant that my team and I had plenty of material to shoot for our own research production, Horror in the Andes, ironically—and quite sadly—bringing the inequalities that sustain the gap between us into sharp relief. During my discussions with both directors about the circumstances and conditions of making films in the Andes, two seemingly contradictory concepts kept coming up: fate and choice. Berrocal and Ccorahua used both terms to describe the importance of their stories and the circumstances of making their films. Fate suggests that past, present and future are fixed in time. Greater forces have already determined both the story told in this film, and the fate of the film project itself. While the Incas were destined to be destroyed by the Spanish because of their human weaknesses, Berrocal and Ccorahua seem doomed to fail to complete their film largely because of the inequalities that have led to Ayacucho’s marginal status within national film production. Choice, on the other hand, places human action in the hands of the individual and their capacity to effect change. That is why these two directors explained their decision to rewrite an Andean past in heroic terms: to affect the way “being Andean” is experienced. Ccorahua described his script as a “re-working of a crucial part in Andean history” by showing how one man can change the course of a people’s destiny. The problem was that paradoxically, this vision became increasingly difficult to realize as the filming progressed. And yet, I have come to question how much that matters. Nowadays, I am less concerned with narrative or aesthetic choices than with social relationships and the sense of community created through a project such as this one. After all, this is an essay about a film that has not yet been finished by its makers, and perhaps never will be. In that sense, the project testifies the persistent frailty of Ayaucheans’ own voice when trying to represent themselves cinematically. Precisely because of this, this chapter needed to highlight the constraints of making commercial films in this region. At this point, the task of finishing La maldición del Inca seems difficult to achieve. The directors’ and crew members’ perseverance, however, also shows the creative necessity for, and social dimension of, artistic expression, with whatever means at hand. In this sense, contemporary Andean cinema-making is not just a reflection of a lived reality, but an existential part of it.

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Acknowledgements The Wenner Gren Foundation and the University of Bern supported the research for this paper. I want to thank these institutions for their interest and assistance.

Notes 1. All translations from Spanish are mine, including those of film titles when there are no official translations of them. 2. For reasons of clarity, in this chapter I use Ayacucho to refer to the department, and Huamanga to its capital city, which is referred to locally and internationally alternatively as Huamanga or Ayacucho. 3. According to this myth, the Spaniards decapitated the last Inca rebel, Tupac Amaru I, on Cuzco’s main square. His body parts were scattered and his head publicly displayed as a warning to all insurgents. But instead of decomposing, the head came back to life and rejoined his other body parts. The myth states that when the whole body is reconfigured, it will rise from below the earth and recover its lost power, initiating a new era for Andean civilization (Burga 1988, p. 120). 4. INEI 2017. 5. For instance, with Facebook groups like Runasimita Jacharisun Kuska (Let’s Learn Quechua Together) . 6. For instance, her Trap Quechua song “Tjeras” has been one of her latest hits. The song is a call for women to rise against gender violence against them, a very local and yet global concern (see ), last accessed 10 June 2019.

Works Cited Andrade Ciudad, L., 2019. Diez noticias sobre el quechua en el último censo peruano. Letras-Lima, 90(132), pp. 41–70. Burga, M., 1988. Nacimiento de una utopía: muerte y resurrección de los Incas. Lima: Instituto de Apoyo Agrario. Bustamante, E. and Luna Victoria, J., 2017. Las miradas multiples. Lima: Universidad de Lima Press. Cabrejo, J. C., 2010. El cine de terror regional: la justicia del más allá. Ventana indiscreta: revista de la Facultad de Comunicación, 3, pp. 52–55. Cabrera, D., 2007. Estado de Miedo. Entrevista a Mélinton Eusebio. [Accessed 16 August 2020].

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Castro Pérez, R., 2016. Tales from the Crypt: Horror Movies and Social Crises in the Andes. Revista Chilena de Antropología Visual, 27, pp. 1–22 Ccorahua, M., 2018. Personal Interview. (Personal communication, 22 June 2018). Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación (CVR), 2003. Informe final de la comisión de la verdad y reconciliación, Tomo I–VIII. Lima: CVR. De la Cadena, M., 2000. Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1919–1991. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Degregori, C. I., 1990. Fatal Attraction: Peru’s Shining Path. NACLA Report on the Americas, North American Congress on Latin America. 24, https:// nacla.org/edition/2878. Degregori, C. I., 2010. Qué difícil es ser dios: el partido comunista del Perú: Sendero luminoso y el conflicto armado interno en el Perú, 1980–1999. Lima: IEP. Dios tarda pero no olvida [God Takes His Time, but He Doesn’t Forget], 1996. [film] Directed by Palito Ortega Matute. Peru: Asociación independiente de cine y video, Peru Movie. El misterio del Kharisiri, 2004. [film] Directed by Henry Vallejo. Peru: Pioneros producciones. El rincón de los inocentes [The Corner of the Innocent], 2005. [film] Directed by Palito Ortega Matute. Peru: Asociación independiente de cine y video, Peru Movie. Flores Galindo, A., 1988. In Search of an Inca: Identity and Utopia in the Andes: New Approaches to the Americas Series. London: Cambridge University Press. Gell, A., 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Horror in the Andes, 2019. [film] Directed by Martha-Cecilia Dietrich. Switzerland and UK: University of Bern and Filmmaking for Fieldwork—Productions. Incesto en los Andes, la maldición de los jarjachas [Incest in the Andes, the Curse of the Jarjachas], 2002. [film] Directed by Palito Ortega Matute. Peru: Peru Movie & Roca Films. Jackson, M., 2002. The Politics of Storytelling: Violence, Transgression and Intersubjectivity. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Kirsch, S., 2002. Spectacular Violence, Hypergeography and the Question of Alienation in Pulp Fiction. In: T. Cresswell and D. Dixon, eds. 2002. Engaging Film: Geographies of Mobility and Identity. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 32–46 Lágrimas de fuego [Tears of Fire], 1996. [film] Directed by José Gabriel Huertas and Mélinton Eusebio. Peru: Wari film producciones.

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La maldición del Inca [The Curse of the Inca], (unreleased) [film] Directed by Luis Berrocal and Martin Ccorahua. Perú: Abigail Producciones and Wari Films. La maldición de los Qarqachas 2, 2003. [film] Directed by Palito Ortega Matute. Peru: Roca Films & Fox Perú Producciones. Pishtaco, 2003. [film] Directed by Jose Antonio Martinez Gamboa. Peru: Magnum producciones. Poole, D. and Rénique G., 1991. The New Chroniclers of Peru: US Scholars and Their ‘Shining Path’ of Peasant Rebellion. Bulletin of Latin American Research, 10(2), pp. 133–191. Qarqacha, el demonio del incesto [Quarqacha, the Demon of Incest], 2002. [film] Directed by Eusebio Mélinton. Perú: Ahora o nunca Films. Quinteros, A., 2011. Entretejido de imágenes: encuentros, brechas y memorias latentes en el nuevo cine andino. In G. Cánepa, ed. 2011. Imaginación visual y cultura en el Perú. Lima: Fondo Editorial Pontificia Universidad Católica. pp. 413–426. Rasmussen, M. B., 2017. Tactics of the Governed: Figures of Abandonment in Andean Peru. Journal of Latin American Studies, 49(2), pp. 327–353. Rénique, J. L. and Lerner, A., 2019. Shining Path: The Last Peasant War in the Andes. In H. D. Soifer and A. Vergara, eds. Politics After Violence: Legacies of the Shining Path conflict in Peru, pp. 17–50. Sangre inocente [The Blood of the Innocent], 2000. [film] Directed by Palito Ortega Matute. Peru: Asociación independiente de cine y video, Peru Movie. Uma, cabeza de bruja [The Witch’s Head], 2009. [film] Directed by Lalo Parra. Peru: Amaru producciones cinematográficas. Vich, V., 2010. El discurso de la calle: los cómicos ambulantes y las tensiones de la modernidad en el Perú. Lima: Fondo Editorial PUCP and Instituto de Estudios Peruanos. Walker, C. F., 2014. The Tupac Amaru Rebellion. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Warren, K. B., 2006. Perils and Promises of Engaged Anthropology: Historical Transitions and Ethnographic Dilemmas. In: V. Sanford and A. A. Asale, eds. 2006. Engaged Observers: Anthropology, Advocacy and Activsm. New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers University Press. pp. 213–228. Weismantel, M., 2001. Cholas and Pishtacos: Stories of Race and Sex in the Andes. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

CHAPTER 6

Filming Horror in Post-conflict Peru: Making and Marketing La casa rosada María Eugenia Ulfe

It was early in the afternoon and large vans circulated around the central plaza of the city of Ayacucho.1 Using megaphones, several boys in those vans were announcing screenings of La casa rosada [The Pink House] (2017) “by the great Ayacucho filmmaker Palito Ortega Matute in the municipal cinema of the city.” The entrance to the municipal cinema was crowded with people looking for tickets. The three days of screening were a success: the long queues even crossed the front of the cathedral. I was fortunate to be in Ayacucho for these series of screenings during which the director sought to collect comments and opinions to draw upon before moving to the final phase of post-production. The film was experienced with intensity by the spectators, many of whom engaged in reacting to the characters and the circumstances as if they were real. As the scenes played out on screen, from the screams of the characters dressed as military men, to the horror of the acts of torture, there were people in the audience constantly repeating: “That’s how it was!”

M. E. Ulfe (B) Pontificia Universidad Católica Del Perú, Lima, Peru e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 C. Vich and S. Barrow (eds.), Peruvian Cinema of the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52512-5_6

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This chapter takes an anthropological perspective to analyze the conditions, the modes of production and the circulation of La casa rosada. I use ethnography and image analysis to understand how the film director uses his own history and that of his city to make a film about the armed conflict between the Shining Path and the Peruvian state (1980–2000), centered upon and experienced in Ayacucho. I show how storytelling becomes a platform for memory to emerge effectively and affectively, exploring the ways that certain fictional approaches allow the drama to emerge as truthful, and are well-suited for the recreation of violent pasts.2 I argue that La casa rosada, as an example of narrative fiction cinema, brings alive the violence as experienced by the city of Ayacucho with particular resonance and more effectively than other forms of cultural production (Fig. 6.1). In order to shape this argument, I draw on the concepts of cultural intimacy and shared vulnerability to explore and understand the specific form of closeness between producers, directors, actors, the city, and how this bears on the circulation of the film, giving rise to a particularly distinctive emotional connection between the audience and what is experienced on screen. The British anthropologist Michael Herzfeld coined these terms to describe the specific forms of collective recognition and identity politics involved in the development of nationalism and patriotism in Greece, while others have deployed the concept to explore different nations’ distinctive responses to armed conflict. I will adopt and adapt, in a liberal fashion, Herzfeld’s approach here to refer to and explore the specific mode of production and circulation involved in films like La casa rosada which are themselves a response to some of the effects and events of the Peruvian armed conflict. The informal and artisanal approach used by the filmmaker is what I consider as cultural intimacy in this particular case: it describes a special and distinctive bond established between the director, actors, and producers as well as with the spectators who perceive themselves as part of the film, or as related to the story recreated within it. Hertzfeld’s further emphasis on the shared vulnerability among all these subjects is what reinforces the bond that the film—in all its aspects—creates between them. The director in question, Palito Ortega Matute, belongs to a generation of film directors that promotes production from their hometown, Ayacucho, in the Peruvian Andes. He stands out as one of the pioneers in what is known in Lima as “regional cinema” (Bustamante and Luna Victoria 2017) or as “new Andean cinema” (Quinteros 2011, p. 415),

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Fig. 6.1 Film poster for La casa rosada (Ortega Matute 2017)

although Ortega Matute himself was always critical of this geographically decentered denomination that emphasizes the marginalization of regions of Peru outside of Lima.3 Instead, he described himself as a self-taught director who worked primarily with video,4 who had trained in anthropology and showed a great passion for visual culture. His films embody a cosmopolitanism that has a strong emphasis on the incorporation of local ingredients, portraying the region’s own historicity and traditions, while also revealing influences from Hollywood action films, Peruvian indigenista culture, and Ayacucho’s own recent political history.

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An introduction to one of Ortega Matute’s earlier works will set the scene for a better understanding of how the success of La casa rosada marks a turning point for the cinema of Ayacucho both locally and outside its regional sphere. His debut feature, Dios tarda, pero no olvida [God May Be Late, But Never Forgets] (1996), was premiered at the local cinema theater in Ayacucho. For the director, this was the first film that could legitimately be called Ayacuchean since it was written and directed by, and starred people from Ayacucho like himself (Del Pino 2018, p. 190), unlike others that had simply used Ayacucho and its stories as a location. It tells the story of Cirilo, a child who loses his parents in the Peruvian armed conflict and who is mistreated by relatives with whom he is forced to live in the city. On a very low budget, Ortega Matute created a powerful film that showed the conflict through the eyes and experiences of this child. The reception of the film in Ayacucho was extremely positive in terms of ticket sales and audience reaction, and it was shown in other provincial Peruvian cities such as Abancay, Andahuaylas, Cuzco, Huancayo, Puno, Juliaca (Del Pino 2018, p. 185). This was notable, since the circulation of films made outside Lima is normally highly localized (usually only within the cities or towns where the films are produced) and so can rarely be considered as thoroughly “regional” (Bustamante and Luna Victoria 2017, pp. 43–55). With Dios tarda, pero no olvida, Ortega Matute transcended that limitation.5 However, when he took the film to Lima and organized a screening with journalists to collect their feedback, they described it as naive and criticized the technical problems they saw in the editing and in its limited audiovisual resources. Because of these criticisms, Ortega Matute was unable to secure a screening slot in commercial theaters in Lima (Lama 1998). Despite these challenges, the director remained committed to telling the stories of Ayacucho within the broad context of the armed conflict via cinema, and after producing a series of films that focused more on folklore, he produced La casa rosada in which he took up this theme again with what became his most recognized work, shown in movie theaters nationwide as well as abroad, and winning several awards.6 This turned out to be Ortega Matute’s last film: he died a couple of months before its release across Peruvian theaters in May 2018. The rest of this chapter is organized into three sections. The title of the first one adopts the phrase that accompanied the announcement of the film, “The history that has never been told in Peru,” and discusses the film’s specific historical background. It also introduces the protagonists; considers how they bring to life events that occurred in the city during

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those years as experienced by the director. I also present the specific emotional role that the Ayacuchean cityscape invokes in the film. In the second section, “Cultural intimacy as a production technique,” I develop the concepts of “cultural intimacy” and “vulnerability,” describing and analyzing the modes of production used in the making of this film.7 The last section, “Cultural intimacy in circulation,” extends the consideration of cultural intimacy and vulnerability further in order to describe and understand the circulation and marketing of the film.

Section One: “The History That Has Never Been Told in Peru” Even if you had not lived through these difficult experiences, the fact of being Ayacuchean already gives you the ability to tell the stories in another way, because you have experienced it. Only we really know what happened in Ayacucho […] A sense of duty calls me to tell the stories without manipulating, without plotting, without erasing the story that happened in Ayacucho. (Ortega Matute in Del Pino 2018, p. 190)

The years between 1980 and 2000 are recognized widely as the most violent in Peruvian contemporary republican history (Degregori 2014). This period began when the Communist Party of Peru-Shining Path (PCP-SL) declared war on the Peruvian state in May 1980 in Chuschi, Ayacucho. Although the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR) (2003) acknowledges that more than 50% of the fatalities that occurred during those years were caused by PCP-SL, it also highlights that the armed forces were responsible for brutal acts of repression that resulted in even more violence. The specific context of La casa rosada is the city of Ayacucho during the first years of the conflict, that is, the early 1980s. Peruvian anthropologist Degregori historicized the broader underlying issues of the conflict by emphasizing how internal migration for education and work brought tensions between parents and children who felt they did not fit into their parents’ rural world nor into the city itself. He emphasized that Shining Path militants were mostly young people whose hostility arose from these tensions (Degregori 2011, pp. 17–18). La casa rosada represents these historical facts with a story that covers the apparently unjust arrest of the protagonist, a University professor who is tortured in a clandestine

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detention center called La Casa Rosada. Some biographical aspects of the main character resemble those of Abimael Guzmán Reynoso, the actual leader of the Shining Path, for example, before embarking on leadership of the armed struggle, Guzmán was also a professor of Philosophy at the Universidad Nacional de San Cristóbal de Huamanga (UNSCH) in Ayacucho. Other than this, relatively little is known about Guzmán life during those early years, and the film does not claim to offer a biography of the Shining Path’s leader, and yet the connections have proved difficult for some audiences to ignore. The escalation of violence in Ayacucho led to the declaration of “states of emergency,” which could be understood in the sense that Agamben outlines as “states of exception,” whereby the loss of constitutional rights means that lives may be fully disposed of with impunity (1998, p. 27). Toward the end of 1982, the first state of emergency was declared in several provinces of Ayacucho that included its capital, the city of Ayacucho itself. With these states of emergency came the curfews, along with the intense violence enacted by the Shining Path, the Armed Forces, and the population. The film takes place in this context of uncertainty and fear. It shows the enforcement of the curfews, with images of the police and the military on their rounds at nighttime as well as the young Shining Path members running throughout the city, and the terror of all those citizens who felt their lives were at constant risk. La casa rosada was the longest project of Palito Ortega Matute’s professional career in that he started developing the idea thirteen years before it was released, but also worked on numerous other projects during that time. After Dios tarda pero no olvida was released in 1996, Ortega Matute worked on the sequel to that film and then developed a series of terror films under the name Jarjachas. Toward the beginning of the 2000s, he completed Sangre inocente [Innocent Blood] (2001) and then El Rincón de los inocentes [The Innocents’ Corner] (2005). La casa rosada might be considered as the last part of a trilogy that began with those two films since all three offer perspectives of the armed conflict as experienced in Ayacucho, albeit from different angles. For example, in an interview with Peruvian film scholar Emilio Bustamante, Ortega Matute admitted that La casa rosada is indeed closely related to Sangre inocente: indeed, the titular “pink house” of his last film appears as a place of torture in Sangre inocente, and much of that earlier film takes place in this establishment. Nevertheless, he emphasizes that the characters and the story of La casa rosada are quite different from the earlier two so

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this trio of films should not be considered as a straightforward trilogy (Bustamante and Luna Victoria 2017, pp. 135–136). In La casa rosada the main character is Adrián Mendoza (José Luis Adrianzen) a professor of philosophy at the Universidad Nacional de San Cristóbal de Huamanga (UNSCH) who studied theology and wanted to be a priest. As well as partly portraying the story of Shining Path leader Abimael Guzmán himself during his own time at the UNSCH, Mendoza’s story also embodies the anxiety that many professors based in Ayacucho felt when they feared being arbitrarily denounced as a Shining Path insurgent or sympathizer if fitting the stereotype of the time. “I’m a professor!” he exclaims several times when he is arrested for listening to the radio broadcast while driving home from buying bread with his son about the hijacking of a local radio station by a group of Shining Path members. His son hides in the back of the car and then runs home to tell his sister and his aunt what has happened to his father. The silence that then emerges when images are shown of the windows of all the houses that are boarded up in order “not to see,” “not to hear,” and “not to say” triggered many memories for the local Ayacuchean spectators. During the time of the conflict, to see or to hear something was to enter into contact with the violence, that is, to establish a relationship with it and to confirm its very existence. Therefore, the safest language of the war was silence; a silence that was filled with memories experienced through the very bodies of the characters and also through those of the spectators. Because silence shows the fracture of social bonds, then violence not only rests on the use of weapons and torture, but on the fragmentation of social ties. As Connerton suggests, silence might be understood as a form of oblivion; he defines it as “humiliated silence,” a type of silence that devours the subject, becoming an unsustainable pain (Connerton 2008, pp. 67–69). This silence also translates into the generalized distrust that emerges and spreads corrosively through the city as polluting air. It is here that we see the other body that suffers in the film: that of the city of Ayacucho. Nobody knows anything; nobody wants to form relationships with anyone. The redundancy and iteration of this powerful emotional cinematic recreation of the city forms an indispensable part of the aesthetics of the film, tracing the type of horror lived in Ayacucho and in Peru during those years. This is a visual form of emotional reconstruction of the city and its recent past and it clearly connects what is presented on screen with the Ayacuchean audience in a very intimate way. This particular aspect of vulnerability is thus expressed

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through the specific depictions of violence and also connects back with local horror folktales that inform Ortega Matute’s other films. Peruvian Andean stories of pishtacos , ñaqaq and condenados 8 tend to portray death happening in slow motion, as something very painful, as a form of torture leaving traces on the bodies that will never disappear and recounted by those few who survive. This is precisely what Ortega Matute shows with quite explicit torture scenes in the version of the film that was exhibited in Ayacucho in 2016, and then edited out by him from the version which was projected in cinemas nationwide in 2018. While for the Ayacuchean audience these torture scenes had to be realistic and make explicit connections to what happened in the city at that time, feedback from audiences outside Ayacucho indicated that these lengthy scenes of suffering were excessively shocking, and so Ortega Matute and his producer made the decision to remove them. The film’s action takes place at the time when the Armed Forces had already taken control of the city. In December 1982, President Fernando Belaúnde Terry signed the order for the Armed Forces to control those areas named as emergency zones: Ayacucho was one of those. In the opening scene, the protagonists are preparing for their traditional Christmas toast with panettone, sitting at the table amidst the blackout that had become a usual occurrence during those years of violence. Scenes like this one that draw on the reality of the experience for those who lived through the violence emphasize the kind of “being there” characteristic of the testimonial film; however, it is the use of fiction that allows the story to be constructed with greater authenticity and emotional impact. This is not the type of story that can be read in the final report of the CVR; it is not a specific testimony with name and surname, but rather it is the depiction of a particular atmosphere as it was lived by the city’s inhabitants. As Ortega Matute said about the film, “[this] is not based on the story of someone special, but on the anecdotes of several people. The film conceptualizes the general context of political violence through fiction” (interviewed by Cárdenas 2018). This dimension of authenticity and emotional vulnerability is also revealed as the film develops a sense of the specific topography of Ayacucho’s violence: the curfews, the urban incursions of the army or of Shining Path members at any time of the day or night, the nocturnal arrests by the military police, and the radio takeovers by Shining Path members to announce their armed strikes. La casa rosada articulates, spatializes, and frames violence in specific sites of the city of Ayacucho such as the barracks

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of Los Cabitos, the Casa Rosada as the clandestine detention center, the landslides around the city which were used as waste dumps for corpses, the incineration point known as La Hoyada9 and the police station. Thus, distinct locations with particular affective resonance and intimacy for local audiences are used in the film, such as in the scenes where the children find their father bleeding in one of the landslide areas. Through these very specific and distinctive circumstances, highly affective and effective ties are developed between filmmaker, film and audience.

Section Two: Cultural Intimacy as Production Technique Cinema in effect is a multitude of things. It is the material place where we go to be entertained by the spectacle of shadows […] It is also the residue of those presences that accumulates and settles in us as their reality fades and alters over time: that other cinema reconstituted by our memories and our words, which can be distinctly different from what has been projected on screen. Cinema is also an ideological apparatus producing images that circulate in society and in which society recognizes its modern stereotypes, its legends from the past and its imagined future. […] (Ránciere 2014, pp. 5–6)

I use the concept of cultural intimacy here to describe a domestic and artisanal mode of production that is characteristic of regional films in Peru. I explore how these films develop a connection first and foremost with local audiences. The term “domestic” is used here to refer to the way that directors such as Ortega Matute involve relatives, close friends, local community members, and local authorities in the making of films, inviting them to participate as actors, as extras, or to bring homemade food onto the set for cast and crew. This creates a very distinctive sense of closeness as most people know each other very well and form a close bond through the making of a film that is based on shared experiences of a highly sensitive nature. The scarcity of resources also creates a vulnerability that is shared by many filmmakers while at the same time giving them the motivation to design strategies to overcome this material challenge. The dependency on familial networks extends to the distribution and exhibition phases, as discussed further in the third section below.

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To discuss and understand cultural intimacy in the context of film production in the Peruvian Andes, we need to pay particular attention to the specific film culture in Ayacucho in the 1980s, and to the technological devices that became popular for viewing and making films, thereby developing a particular type of film culture. Analyzing Ayacuchean cinema, Alonso Quinteros has highlighted the influence of Hollywood action films of the 1970s and 1980s, which were quite popular in Ayacucho thanks to the widespread use of Betamax and VHS films (2011, p. 416). Actors like Sylvester Stallone, Jean Claude Van Damme, or Bruce Willis and their action movies, marked a popular and appealing style for the making of audiovisual stories. In addition, video cameras became increasingly popular and Ortega Matute himself started his career with VHS and Super VHS, filming on a daily basis. He created a small film company and made films of special family festivities such as weddings or local festivals, thus perfecting his filmmaking technique and deepening his involvement in his own community as the local filmmaker of choice. Ortega Matute’s approach to film production came to embody what has been identified by Peruvian social scientists as an ethics of new entrepreneurship: a form of collective work that draws on the principles of extended family collaboration and competition between the parties (Adams and Valdivia 1991). Previously, the works of Enrique Mayer and Marisol de la Cadena (1989) on cooperation and conflict in Andean communities, had accounted for this system of mutual aid sustained in different forms of reciprocity, which always also implied a form of competition. This ethical approach is based on a deeply-felt sense of family which emphasizes social ties and bonds, and which was specifically noted by Adams and Valdivia as a characteristic feature of Andean immigrants to Lima in the early 1990s. Their book differentiates migrants of Andean origin, referred to in the title as “the other entrepreneurs,” from other migrants due to their specific work ethic based on reciprocity and competition. In the context of twenty-first century Peru, Ortega Matute’s way of working also aligns with the neoliberal rationality that has become dominant in the country and elsewhere in the region since the 1990s. I would argue that the concept of cultural intimacy as a mode of production based on extensive family and local cooperation (something which became fundamental to the development of Ayacuchean cinema from the 1990s onward) is in itself part of the general landscape of what Gago (2015)

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describes as neoliberalism from below. This domestic mode of production relates to the discourse and practice of entrepreneurship in contexts of socio-economic precarity with stories of personal sacrifice, solidarity, and collective effort. Cultural intimacy was crucial to the film’s distinctive funding model in that essential resources were provided by family and community networks. Ortega Matute started filming La casa rosada in 2011 and finished it in 2016, a lengthy process due to budget constraints and the precarious methods he needed to deploy in order to gather in the resources. In 2009 he received a state funding award via CONACINE that helped him finish the production10 but there was no follow-up from CONACINE to monitor progress, nor the funds required for the distribution or exhibition of the final product. As a consequence, the funds were used in their entirety only to support the main production and post-production expenses. In fact, as the director’s sister Mara Ortega Matute explained in her interview with me (8 March 2019), the funding contributed only approximately 40% of the costs of the film, and the rest was covered by Ortega Matute’s own family network, many of whom were members of the production company, with tasks that ranged from finding locations and facilities to reviewing drafts of the script, and to taking responsibility for the marketing of the film.11 Describing in interviews at the time of the film’s release how they worked on the film’s production, Nelba Acuña, the director’s widow, explained that her mother lent them many things to reconstruct the houses and their interiors as they looked in the early 1980s (Cabel 2018). Many items such as the furniture, the paintings, the Ayacuchean blankets, and the distinctive hats were her own personal belongings. Her mother also accompanied them during the recordings, taking care of the cast and crew. Mara described how they worked during the film, with many auditions and training for the local young actors such as those who played the civic patrol group from Ayacucho, and the group of young people from the Army academy who acted as part of the platoons of the Peruvian Army, as well as the child protagonists who had never acted before. She highlighted that Nelba and Palito Ortega Matute’s family usually featured in his work on screen. Nelba´s mother appears in the Rincón de los inocentes ; Nelba, herself an actress, appears in all of his films; and the naked bodies (whose faces remain unseen) of the victims of violence in La casa rosada are those of family and friends, filmed only by Ortega Matute in order to maintain trust and confidentiality. This closeness of

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the director and the ensemble of actors to the material aspects of the film creates an intimate bond with the story itself, as well as with the city, perceived by cast and crew as very much their own. Ortega Matute said on many occasions that he always felt a great need to tell the stories of his community with his camera, often working on several scripts at once, always focusing on the violence he had seen and experienced in Ayacucho from where he gathered his material. In his own words: I am Ayacuchean […] I can say that I am a victim, witness and survivor of that moment. I have the ability to tell the story from a fairly neutral and truthful point of view. There are a number of situations that have marked my life and some of the memories I have are captured in the film.12

When approaching this type of Ayacuchean cinema, the concept of cultural intimacy may also refer to its content in addition to its production and circulation methods. Personal stories, recent regional history, a testimony or a character that is known by the local communities are also essential components. But, just how “neutral and truthful” is a filmmaker, who was born and has grown up in a violent context, when producing a film about violence as it happened in his city? Fiction allows directors to depict stories from their own perspectives and this story is no exception. It is the director’s viewpoint that frames their camera lenses which can never be entirely neutral.

Section Three: Cultural Intimacy as Circulation Practice In the previous section, I discussed the processes of filmmaking in relation to cultural intimacy. This final section is about the promotion, circulation, and exhibition of La casa rosada, and explores the ways that different strategies based on family networks were put to work, specifically in terms of developing an audience base that began with the local and eventually extended to other regions of Peru, including to Lima, and to the global festival circuit. The first screening of La casa rosada in Ayacucho was in 2016 and was used both as a local release and as a test event. As Mara recounted in her interview with me (2019), it was important to gather and record the first impressions of the film from the audience so as to incorporate those responses into a new version for later release. That first version is longer

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than the final one which was eventually released in 2018, in five cinema theaters in Lima, in almost all the regional capitals in the country, and at several festivals abroad. For the most part, it was the explicit torture scenes that were removed from the final cut, with the film retaining a sense of the extreme violence and pain of torture without showing it directly. Ortega Matute paid special attention to the representation of torture, insisting that the violence must be portrayed “as it was” but without dramatizing it. For him, it was important for the public to get a sense of those scenes of torture but not to feel overwhelmed by them. We should note that in interviews shortly before his death, Ortega Matute had wanted to emphasize that his films “do not advocate terrorism” despite the focus on the torture of alleged insurgents by the military.13 Nevertheless, this film provoked controversy: just a few days after its premiere in Lima, Peruvian actress Karina Calmet wrote on Twitter on May 11, 201814 that the film served as a defense of terrorism and that it should not be seen. In fact, this conservative attack prompted even more people to go to the theaters and watch it. It remained on screens for seven weeks, an unprecedented success in terms of distribution and exhibition for any Peruvian film, let alone one made in Ayacucho. As part of the distribution plan, Mara Ortega reported that she and their son worked directly with the cinema managers to design, prepare, and display the banners and billboards themselves with great enthusiasm. They also designed flyers, which they distributed near theaters in Limeño districts as varied and dispersed as Chorrillos, San Martín de Porres, Jesús María, San Juan de Lurigancho, and the Northern Cone. Their contract with the theaters keeps the official commitments between the parties confidential, but it is clear that the family was allowed to use their own mechanisms to get more people to the screenings in order to have the schedules extended and to increase audience numbers. For example, Mara organized special screenings, promoted via Whatsapp, for which people could buy a number of tickets at a discounted price, thus ensuring that there would be enough attendees to secure another week in the cinema. In fact, she still has Whatsapp groups with people she does not know directly who live in different parts of the country and who continue to ask her for special screenings in their cities (Ortega 2019). This allowed the film to be shown in Puno, Cajamarca, Piura, as well as in Cusco, Arequipa, Trujillo, Chiclayo, and Tacna, where the

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on-screen events would have been less intimately shared but recognizable nevertheless. Moreover, with the use of networks associated with cell phone communication, this distinctive approach to the film’s circulation gives rise to another understanding of “cultural intimacy” in the cinematic context, one which brings together spectators from around the country who want to share in the experience of watching La casa rosada. One of the most commonly expressed wishes among the country’s film community is that Peruvian cinema not only grows in quantity but above all in diversity and quality. Ortega Matute was always keen to point out that once digital technology became accessible in Ayacucho, regional cinema would have the potential to thrive. However, his concern was also to find ways to improve techniques of production, thus creating works that would be acceptable for national and international releases, moving beyond the local base. Despite many efforts by filmmakers, the recently approved Peruvian Film Law15 still does not address the challenge, especially for regional filmmakers and their products of ensuring not only access to theaters but also reasonable time slots for screening their films so that they can attract and retain the large audiences. In this chapter, the concept of cultural intimacy has helped to highlight the particular kind of production and circulation processes involved in the cinema made by directors such as Ortega Matute, who rely on very specific and intimate connections with their local community, its people, its landscape, and its recent history. We might extend the argument to say that amidst the context of precarity, a domestic and artisanal mode of cultural production emerges to enable filmmakers and producers somehow to continue their work. Indeed, Renato Ortega is now following in his father’s footsteps: along with his mother, Nelba Acuña, and his aunts and uncles, he is developing the scripts which his father continued to write even after he became ill. Family members are committed to maintaining Palito Ortega Matute’s legacy, including taking responsibility for ensuring that his films are programmed in festivals and universities throughout Peru, and for continuing to support all efforts to ensure that the new cinema law will benefit future Peruvian filmmakers from outside Lima. Once more, the extended family is at work in a domestic mode of production and circulation that sets out to overcome the challenges and limitations of a precarious context—and the sense of vulnerability resulting from this—through efficient networks of familial support and different forms of personal bonds.

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Acknowledgments I would like to thank Pierre Emilie Vandoorne, director of the Audiovisual, Phonography and New Media Directorate (DAFO) for giving me important information about La casa rosada and for helping me contact Nelba Acuña, wife of Palito Ortega Matute. Special thanks to Mara Ortega, Renato Ortega, and Nelba Acuña for their conversations, message exchanges, emails, and all the information they gave me during my research. May this paper be a form of recognition to Palito Ortega Matute.

Notes 1. The capital city of the department of Ayacucho was originally named San Juan de la Frontera de Huamanga, but in everyday use, people refer to it as either Huamanga or Ayacucho. In this essay I will use Ayacucho to refer to this city. 2. This has been demonstrated in recent productions about the armed conflict in Peru in documentaries (Ulfe 2017) and in fiction films such as La última tarde [One Last Afternoon] (2016), NN (2014) and many others. 3. In 2018, the Ministry of Culture recognized Ortega Matute as “Meritorious Personality in Culture” for his contribution to national cinema and his vast film production. 4. In the 1990s, digital technology was not available in Ayacucho and in any case, Ortega Matute wanted to make professional films using 35-millimeter film stock. The first work he made with that film-based technology was La casa rosada. 5. Bustamante and Luna Victoria (2017, pp. 43–55) also indicate that these films are copied and sold in places like Polvos Azules in Lima and other street markets in Peru. 6. Among the awards, those received in 2016 stand out, including those for Best Director and Best Art Direction at film festivals in Spain and Argentina (2016 and 2017), respectively. See: Cine peruano: galardona película La casa rosada se estrena en mayo. Available at: https://larepu blica.pe/espectaculos/1228534-cine-peruano-galardona-pelicula-la-casarosada-se-estrena-en-mayo/EMPRESA/EMPRESA/. 7. Translation of this and of all quotes in Spanish is mine. In this one, the emphasis is also mine. 8. Pishtacos , ñaqaq and condenados are terror characters mentioned in several Andean narratives. The first two appear in dark places and kill their victims to steal their human fat for different purposes. For instance, as Morote Best (1988) explains, the fat of “gringos” or foreigners is sold for money. Condenados are depicted as people who have trespassed norms such as incest. They are condemned never to die completely and to roam in

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9.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

remote areas. As noted by Raúl Castro (2016) and Emilio Bustamante in this volume, these characters have been reinterpreted by cinema directors from Ayacucho such as Ortega Matute and Melintón Eusebio. La Hoyada was part of the military base Los Cabitos and, as a recent trial showed, it was the place where people who disappeared during those years were incinerated (Jave Pinedo 2015). Established by members of the National Association of the Relatives of the Kidnapped, Detained and Disappeared of Peru (ANFASEP), La Hoyada has now become a place for remembrance of the victims of the violence during the conflict. Since CONACINE became DAFO (in 2012), these awards now include a follow-up of the progress, the requirement of an execution report and a copy of the final edited version of the film. Ortega Matute’s film company was called Peru Movie E.I.R.L. Nelba Acuña, Ortega Matute’s widow, is now the producer and runs the company together with Renato Ortega, their son, who was also in charge of editing with his father. Palito Ortega Matute comenta su película La casa rosada. Número Zero published February 2016. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=J9QrBOqCGoM&t=14s [Accessed April 4 2019]. See: Palito Ortega Matute comenta su película La casa rosada. See for instance: Karina Calmet arremete contra película La casa rosada y se arma polémica en Twitter, La República, Espectáculo, 11 May 2018. Peru’s most recent Film Law was finally approved in December 2019.

Works Cited Adams, N. and Valdivia, N., 1991. Los otros empresarios: ética de migrantes y formación de empresas en Lima. Colección mínima. Lima: IEP. Agamben, G., 1998. Homo Sacer: el poder soberano y la nuda vida. Valencia: Pre Textos. Bustamante, E. and Luna Victoria J., 2017. Las miradas múltiples: el cine regional peruano. Tomo I y Tomo II. Lima: Fondo editorial de la Universidad de Lima. Cabel, A., 2018. La Casa Rosada, homenaje y documento de memoria. La mula, 16 May. Available at: https://deunsilencioajeno.lamula.pe/2018/05/16/lacasa-rosada-homenaje-y-documento-de-memoria/andrea.cabel/ [Accessed 21 November 2019]. Cárdenas, T., 2018. Mis películas no hacen apología del terrorismo. Luces, El Comercio, 28 October. Castro, R., 2016. Cuentos de la cripta: filmes de horror y crisis social en los Andes. Revista Chilena de Antropología Visual, 27, pp. 1–22. Comisión de la Verdad y la Reconciliación (CVR), 2003. Informe final. Lima: CVR

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Connerton, P., 2008. Seven Types of Forgetting. Memory Studies, 1(1), pp. 59– 71. Degregori, C. I., 2011. El surgimiento de Sendero Luminoso: Ayacucho 1969– 1979: del movimiento por la gratuidad de la enseñanza al inicio de la lucha armada. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos. Degregori, C. I., 2014. Heridas abiertas, derechos esquivos: derechos humanos, memoria y Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación. Obras escogidas IX Carlos Iván Degregori. Lima: IEP. Del Pino, P., 2018. Cine ayacuchano y filmación de la violencia. Entrevista con Palito Ortega Matute. In: C. Milton, ed. 2018. El arte desde el pasado fracturado peruano. Lima: IEP. pp. 177–203 Dios tarda, pero no olvida [God May Be Late, But Never Forgets], 1996. [film] Directed by Palito Ortega Matute. Peru: Peru Movie. El rincón de los inocentes [The Innocents’ Corner], 2005. [film] Directed by Palito Ortega Matute. Peru: Peru Movie, Fox Peru producciones, Andina compañía cincematográfica. Gago, V., 2015. La razón neoliberal. Economías barrocas y pragmática popular. Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón. Herzfeld, M., 2005. Cultural Intimacy. Social Poetics in the Nation State. New York and London: Routledge. Jave Pinedo, I., 2015. El santuario de la memoria de La Hoyada, Ayacucho. Proceso de diálogo y participación en la construcción de un espacio de memoria. In: Instituto de Investigación Científica de la Universidad de Lima, ed. 2015. Anuario de Investigaciones. Lima: Universidad de Lima. pp. 54–55. La casa rosada [The Pink House], 2017. [film] Directed by Palito Ortega Matute. Peru: Peru Movie and Andina compañía cinematográfica. Lama, A., 1998. Perú: El cine artesanal con “Dios tarda, pero no olvida.” IPS Noticias [online] 6 November. Available at: [Accessed 21 November 2019]. La última tarde [One Last Afternoon], 2016. [film] Directed by Joel Calero. Peru: Facoría sur producciones and Bhakti Films. Mayer, E. and De la Cadena, M., 1989. Cooperación y conflicto en la comunidad andina. Zonas de producción y organización social. Colección mínima. Lima: IEP. Morote Best, E., 1988. Aldeas sumergidas: cultura popular y sociedad en los Andes. Cusco: Centro de Estudios Rurales Andinos, Bartolomé de las Casas. NN: Sin identidad, 2014. [film] Directed by Héctor Gálvez. Peru: Piedra alada producciones. Ortega, Mara. Personal interview: Email. 8 March 2019. Quinteros, A., 2011. Entretejidos de imágenes: encuentros, brechas y memorias latentes en el nuevo cine andino. In: G. Cánepa, ed. 2011. Imaginación visual y cultura en el Perú. Lima: Fondo editorial de la PUCP. pp. 413–426.

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Ránciere, J., 2014. The Intervals of Cinema. London: Verso. Ulfe, M. E., 2017. Dicen que el cóndor da vueltas, buscando… Tres relatos visuales sobre el conflicto armado interno peruano. In: L. Kogan, J. Villa and G. Pérez, eds. 2017. El Perú desde el cine. Plano contra plano. Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Universidad del Pacífico.

CHAPTER 7

In Search of an Audience: Cinema of Northern Peru, the Case of Omar Forero Sarah Barrow

One of the distinctive features of twenty-first century Peruvian cinema is the greater visibility of films made outside Lima. Small but significant numbers of these have secured festival screenings, won funding awards and received critical acclaim. Omar Forero, born in Lima and long based in the northwestern city of Trujillo in the coastal-desert Department of La Libertad, is one notable example: his third feature, Chicama (2012), secured state funding and won five awards at the Lima Film Festival in 2012, including “Best Peruvian film”, as voted by the national film critics association (APRECI). His subsequent feature project Casos complejos [Complex Cases] (2018) received a State funding award,1 a premiere screening at the twenty-second Lima Film Festival, and slots on the national commercial and global festival exhibition circuits. This chapter explores Omar Forero’s work as a case study through which to challenge the apparent binarism of the concept of Peruvian regional cinema that has tended to set marginalized filmmaking communities against a Lima-based

S. Barrow (B) University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 C. Vich and S. Barrow (eds.), Peruvian Cinema of the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52512-5_7

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“white norm” (Shohat and Stam 2003‚ p. 4) in a way that underplays the wide range of different approaches taken by those regional filmmakers, as well as the quality of their work. I contend that Forero aligns more accurately with the paradigm of “global auteur” (Jeong and Szaniawski 2016; Elsaesser 2019) in terms of outlook and practice than with “regional filmmaker”, and that while his work remains rooted in and influenced by his specific experiences of life in La Libertad and offers a distinctive perspective on provincial Peruvian society, its themes and aesthetics have already resonated with other filmmakers, critics and audiences worldwide. By recognizing Forero’s commitment both to a realist sensibility and a challenge to the (Peruvian) neoliberalist agenda, this chapter thus seeks to expand our awareness of Peruvian “regional” cinema of the twentyfirst century by highlighting its vibrancy and diversity and moving beyond the rubric of peripheral-versus-marginal. At the same time, I show how filmmakers such as Forero continue to struggle to find their audience, thus emphasizing the precarity of the “cycle of cinematic production” in Peru (Delgado 2019). Finally, this chapter traces Forero’s trajectory as a filmmaker whose work provides a fresh conception of Peruvian national cinema in the twenty-first century, one that disrupts and defies any easy categorization.

Forero and the Regional Cinema of Peru Since the mid-1990s, low-budget productions have been shot in almost all the regions of Peru. According to scholars and critics Emilio Bustamante and Jaime Luna Victoria, there have emerged two broad types of cinema from across the vast swathe of the nation outside the quasimegalopolis of Lima. One type focuses, they argue, on the production of feature films that combine mythical characters, oral tradition and contemporary themes with the conventions of genre cinema, and which is aimed at a local mass audience. The other is a form of auteur cinema, taking influences from global independent filmmaking, aimed at national and international festival spectators (2017, p. 21). In both cases, exhibition at national level through the commercial circuit is virtually impossible and where it is achieved, that circuit is normally restricted to screens in Lima-based multiplexes and cinemas in the region of origin of the filmmaker, where those exist. This chapter explores the position of the work of Omar Forero, acknowledged as the most important filmmaker to come from the northern region of La Libertad, whose background and work

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would seem to place him squarely within the realm of the second category outlined above, that is to say as a (global) auteur director with a distinctive style and world perspective. It is argued here that Forero’s worldview, which unveils some of the challenging consequences of neoliberalism and honours the spirit of humanity, aligns well with the conventions of a contemporary global auteur, described by Jeong and Szaniawski as combining philosophical reflection with political observation along with cinematographic artistry (2016, p. 9). His films have satisfied the expectations of most of the Peruvian critics, garnering positive reviews and appearing on end-of-year lists of films that have impressed them the most.2 Described by several of those critics as meeting the expectations of festival films, Forero’s work combines cinematographic innovation and an external perspective with stories, themes and characters that shine a light directly on provincial Peruvian life, making the kind of social contribution that is explored in detail in several essays throughout this collection, while at the same time offering a series of still life tableaux of the ordinariness of everyday life. Thus while the reader might have assumed that an essay on a regional filmmaker would have been placed in the second section of this book, in fact, by focusing on the relationship between film, audience and global aesthetics, this chapter transcends the dichotomy that all too often pits regional versus Lima-based filmmakers and which risks glossing over the potential for international and transnational perspectives of directors from the provinces. By arguing that Forero works within the rubric of global auteur, I highlight the connections with directors in different corners of the world who share his commitment to place, people and politics through cinema. In particular, I reflect on his philosophical approach, tracing through his characters a tendency towards the “failures and potentials […] of raising questions and seeking answers” (Jeong and Szaniawski 2016, p. 7). And yet, despite these global pretensions, Forero’s body of work is also inextricably bound up with the contemporary (provincial) Peruvian context and the consequences of neoliberalism, using primarily realist techniques, tableau sequences and affective character development as representational modes through which to draw attention to some of the key challenges that have faced Peruvian society over decades. Finally, though, this chapter draws attention to the ongoing struggle of filmmakers from all parts of Peru to find an audience through commercial

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exhibition exposure, festival selections and critical support, and to their ongoing devotion to storytelling through cinema in the face of these challenges.

Developing Auteurship Omar Forero’s non-linear trajectory as a filmmaker has been different from many of his regional counterparts in several ways and disrupts the aforementioned dichotomy of Lima-versus-region through the crisscrossing of internal bondaries. He took the opportunity to leave Peru during the 1990s while in his twenties, escaping the immediate economic and political turmoil of the Shining Path era dominated by a governing regime that brought increasing restrictions to freedom of expression and limited the opportunities for most young Peruvians especially those with creative ambitions. Unlike many other regional directors whose training was more localized and informal, Forero studied at the Universidad Privada Antenor Orrego in Trujillo, and then participated in cinema workshops at De Anza College in California, during which time and for a period afterwards (1998–2007) he made several short films that brought him sufficient attention to attract state and other support for his first feature projects.3 His journey into the cinema profession might therefore be categorized quite comfortably, on the one hand, as one that fits the familiar auteur mould, especially in the Peruvian (mostly Lima-focused) context, with opportunities to be exposed to global cinematic influences and practices first hand, and to produce films that bear his own creative mark, shaped by his own personal experiences. On the other hand, his periods working with associations such as Guarango Films , which focuses on documentary filmmaking and holds a commitment to Peruvian social development, has shaped a more collective way of working outside of Lima.4 While this approach was already apparent in his early works, it has become even more evident in the most recent phases of his career with the establishment of his company Cine de Barrio in Trujillo, and a new drama-documentary project set in the Amazon. He also focused on developing provincial film exhibition, education and training opportunities for a while, helping to establish and run five editions of the Festival X of Independent Video (1999–2003) in Trujillo while also teaching at the Universidad Privada del Norte and running cinema workshops in the area. This chapter thus also highlights Forero’s own commitment to the places, characters, topical issues and practices that matter most to him

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and that “arise within, and remain relevant to, a highly specific historical or cultural formation” (Hjort 2000, p. 106) such as those of the communities in and around Trujillo/La Libertad. From a summary of the early part of his filmography, through to more detailed analysis of two of his most successful films in market terms, Chicama (2012) and Casos complejos (2019), I demonstrate how Forero’s work provides a fresh take on filmmaking in the context of twenty-first century Peruvian cinema. Forero’s first feature, Los actores [The Actors] (2006), was also the first to be filmed entirely in Trujillo by a director from that city. Until this point, the provincial location had been largely ignored by filmmakers interested in the more exotic or apparently dramatic spaces of Peru such as the Andean or Amazonian landscapes.5 Forero had by then achieved a solid reputation as a creator of original experimental short films, including La vida da vueltas [Life Turns Around] (2000), which was made on VHS format, used local non-professional actors, and adopted a complex, triple perspective, Tarantino-esque narrative structure. This short film was recognized with an award that year at the national Festival de Cortometrajes Expecta-CADE. In several ways, the debut feature that followed aligned with the conventions and expectations of “regional” cinema of Peru in that it was made on a very low budget and exhibition was limited: it was screened in informal venues and available thereafter only via pirated DVD copies. However, it also demonstrates a formal expression that differentiates it from, for example, the cinema of Ayacucho, a region of Peru better known for cinematic storytelling that draws on local oral traditions and mythology. By comparison, Los actores adopts the format of multiple intersecting portraits that follow the interactions of sets of characters whose everyday lives are quite separate and yet they come into contact in unexpected ways: a couple in love who are theatre students; a woman who suffers a sudden illness; a lonely watchman; an elderly amateur actor whose dream comes true when he gets the chance to act before an audience. The tableau-esque stylistic approach adopted by the director, marked by long takes (including one of around five minutes long), limited camera movement, natural light and a restrained soundscape that contributes to an intense sense of authenticity and austerity, has become Forero’s signature aesthetic, underpinning an apparently neutralized perspective on the fragments of the lives of his ordinary characters going about their business (Anon 2007). Two other features emerge, to do with tone and genre that can be tracked back to his later work. In terms of tone, and as noted by

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critics Bustamante and Luna Victoria, an air of surrealism, dark humour, irony and mystery resonates in scenes that shed light on the absurdity of ordinary life and an emphasis on performance as a means of survival (2017, p. 273). Scenes that were developed and co-created with the actors through workshops place the actors/characters in situations close to their own lives and focus on the bizarreness of the everyday and the intimate, including the small conversations and silences that take place behind closed doors. Realism is emphasized through the diegetic elements of the soundtrack—small noises such as the munching of toast, the clinking of cups and cutlery and the long silences that punctuate most conversations. With regard to genre, Forero’s debut draws on some of the features of the counter-road movie, common to the cinema of neoliberalism given its contradictory, paradoxical and ambivalent associations with modernity (Lie 2017, p. 10). Los actores is marked by the restlessness of its protagonists, their constantly thwarted desires to be elsewhere, and an aesthetic of stasis. There are no “happy endings”: even while one segment concludes with the young lovers escaping from an oppressive family situation, their future is uncertain.

National Recognition After several years in development, Forero’s next two features were both released in 2012, and picked up many of the features pertaining to style, tone, place and generic disruption that were traced in his earlier works. The first, El ordenador, tells the story of an evangelical preacher (Jorge Segura); we are told during the opening scenes that he knows he is terminally ill. The first half of the film shows him quietly going about his life as a preacher, dedicated to his calling and attempting to create and retain order while everything around him is in chaos, until he discovers that he has very little time left to live. At that point, he returns to his hometown in the mountains to see his mother (Herminia Chunga) and tries to persuade her to return with him to Trujillo. She refuses and instead they reminisce about his childhood, especially his love for singing, and he re-acquaints himself with the simple pleasures of the natural world at the same time as reconnecting with family members. Made with a very low budget and with extremely limited distribution, El ordenador was well received by those critics and audiences who managed to see it, thus securing an important success in terms of reputation. At the Lima Independent Film Festival (2012), which celebrates work made on digital

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format and shown across marginal non-commercial circuits, it won the prize for best Peruvian film, as voted for by the critics in attendance. Although this was already his second feature, it was described as the director’s true “calling card” (Esquives 2013) in that it demonstrated to potential funders the quality of his work and his capacity to narrate a complex and contemplative story about tragedy, death and remorse. It also emphasized the distinctive stylistic features that had been detected in his debut work, such as sparse dialogue and playful, ironic use of diegetic sound to link the inner and outer worlds of the protagonist; long takes, still frames and close tracking shots that serve to develop spectator empathy for his situation while at the same time keeping us at a distance; and a jarring, disruptive editing style that punctuates the narrative flow until the preacher eventually finds peace among the mountains. Critics acknowledged his influences, comparing his slow, austere style and philosophical reflection on estrangement and isolation with that of other contemporary Latin American directors such as the Argentine Lisandro Alonso (Los muertos ) and the Mexican Carlos Reygadas (Japón), as well as the Portuguese director Pedro Costa, remarking on the way Forero’s camera, like those of these global auteurs, seemed to mechanically film the words, gestures, and footsteps of their characters (Anon, 2012). Such comparisons have thus already marked Forero out as an emerging auteur with global as well as local sensibilities, with a distinctive style and a perspective marked by the neoliberalism of Peru. The second of Forero’s films to be released in 2012 was Chicama which garnered even greater attention and support. It had won the first project development prize for regional filmmakers that was administered by CONACINE, the government agency for supporting cinema at that time, as well as a funding award from the Global Film Initiative, administered in the United States.6 The director also secured the contributions and expertise of Lima-based filmmaker Héctor Gálvez as executive producer and as editor of this film, whose own previous successes included documentary Lucanamarca (2008) and Paraíso [Paradise] (2009), an award-winning fiction about the challenges of growing up in a suburb of Lima. Carolina Denegri, an alumnus of the Berlinale Talents programme, representing Peru in 2010, also worked on the film as producer, and the well-established Lima-based company Guarango Films managed the colour and mastering elements of the post-production phase. These notes about the production team all indicate the extent to which Forero had become well regarded amongst and integrated into the Peruvian filmmaking scene. In terms of exhibition, Chicama made a strong national

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impact: it was screened at the main Lima Film Festival and won five prizes there, including best Peruvian feature of that festival and a Special Jury Mention. It was named as the best Peruvian film of the year by the Peruvian Motion Picture Press Association (APRECI), the first time that a film made outside Lima had been recognized by this influential group.7 It secured a modest screening tour in some of the country’s mainstream commercial movie theatres and was then selected to represent Peru in the Goya Awards for Hispanic films (2013). All these achievements serve as indicators of a relatively significant critical and commercial success for a low budget feature made outside the capital city, at a distance from the metropolitan bubble. Thereafter, the film became available on DVD via the outlets in Passage 18 of the renowned marketplace in downtown Lima known as Polvos Azules. In March 2019, Chicama was chosen to feature as one of the nineteen Peruvian films available for viewing across most of the Latin American region via the new Ministry-supported online platform Retina Latina.8 The plot of Chicama follows César (José Sopán), a young man who lives in the small rural village of Cascas who has just graduated from teacher training college and has hit an impasse in his life. The long, still opening shot, with its sparse diegetic soundtrack, shows César and his friends at mid-distance, talking, drinking, hardly moving from their spot in the street as others wander past; it emphasizes stasis and hopelessness. César sees several of his fellow villagers leave to find work in the coastal area of Trujillo, a place that he associates with aspiration and hope, and which eludes him as his efforts to follow his friends are constantly hampered due to limited opportunities. When he applies for a job as a teacher in Trujillo, the lack of vacancies means he ends up forced to accept a position in the tiny mountain village of Santa Cruz de Toledo where life follows a regular pattern shaped by agricultural ritual, daily domestic chores, communal viewing of telenovelas and school routines (Fig. 7.1). In effect, César moves further away from the modernity of Trujillo and towards the apparent isolation of abandoned communities. Unlike Forero’s previous films, this narrative follows just one main thread, César’s thwarted desire to migrate to the coast, and thus offers a deeper contemplation on the tribulations faced by Peruvian young people in the provinces. It foregrounds the young man’s relationships and conversations with others in order to develop a sense of connection for the spectator with the protagonist that allows the viewer to appreciate more fully his personal sense of thwarted ambition. Other characters such as

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Fig. 7.1 The children line up each day before their lessons start in Chicama (Forero 2012)

the new young female teacher, Juanita (Ana Paula Ganoza), who seems entranced by village life and helps César appreciate its value, come and go from the plot; a romance is hinted at but does not progress. Everything turns around César and his desire for what he imagines to be a better future and the film works towards reconnecting him with an appreciation for nature and community. Stylistically, the film emphasizes the young protagonist’s increasing awareness of the value of the landscape around him, with the soundtrack offering important indications of this, from the diegetic singing of the children and villagers at festival time, to the nondiegetic music that accompanies César as he enters Trujillo by bus and then enjoys what appears to be a symbolically cleansing swim of renewal in the ocean as the film closes. In keeping with the (counter) road movie trope alluded to earlier, the promise of a journey (to Trujillo) is only fulfilled when César has learned to appreciate the value of the place where he now works and the people around him there.

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Thematic Continuities and Stylistic Differences Through his films, Forero creates cinematic perspectives of life from the viewpoint of a young man who grew up in northern coastal Peru. Chicama, for example, was largely a response to concerns about youth and lack of opportunity in the region of La Libertad, which despite having improved in recent years continues to be marked by the violence of delinquency, extortion and gangs. The importance of education in terms of personal development and social transformation, drawn no doubt at least in part from Forero’s own experiences as a teacher, is highlighted through the classroom scenes which show César’s efforts to empower the children in his charge to create a life for themselves away from delinquency. His feature films and their protagonists are fictional, and yet are based on detailed forensic original research. His work reveals a commitment to exploring the power of cinema-as-mirror on society and as a mechanism for creating awareness about issues of broad social concern. His subsequent and fourth feature, Casos complejos (2018), drew more broadly on the contemporary context of crisis, scandal and abandonment in the provincial Peruvian justice system, tackling a contemporary issue: insecurity and social disorder caused by a rise in youth crime. It offers an effective critique of the police and legal authorities in Peru based on records of actual investigations undertaken by the Office for Complex Cases in the region of La Libertad between 2013 and 2015. For Forero, cinema of all formats and genres offers “the possibility to present ourselves and to know ourselves as Peruvians, to represent and reflect ourselves” (2019). This approach would seem to strike a chord with the work of veteran Peruvian director Francisco Lombardi many of whose films are powerful fictions based on real events, and yet Forero has spoken in interviews more about the influence of American independent filmmakers of the twenty-first century such as Alexander Payne who uses cinema to tell wry stories about everyday life and ordinary people (Barreto 2018). As such, Forero’s cinephilic reference points would seem to be local, national and global, aligning with the outlook of other auteurs of contemporary world cinema.9

Crime Drama, Corruption and Delinquency Casos complejos adopts the conventions of another popular genre: it is a crime drama about corruption and delinquency, set in the northern desert and coastal region of Libertad ruled by criminal gangs and Mafioso-like

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syndicates. The narrative centres on and oscillates between two protagonists who are each caught up in their own personal conflicts and desires: a district attorney Bardales (Oscar Alarcón) who clings onto the hope of bringing about change in society, and a young hitman Yonatan (Gonzalo Vargas Vilela) who is convinced he has no choice but to kill in order to survive. It begins with a description and reconstruction of a criminal case as told by the police on the scene: two hitmen assassinate a stallholder, with witnesses all around. After a chase sequence, one of them is arrested while the other (Yonatan) escapes into a maize field. Moments later, the attorney taking on this case (Bardales) appears on screen and begins his crusade against a dysfunctional justice system that favours the criminals. The film tracks and probes the young man’s past and his motivations, revealing how he ended up in such a desperate state, working as a hired killer. The story then takes two parallel routes: one following the work of the prosecutor as he determines to catch the criminals against all the odds; the other following the young fugitive in his desperate attempt to elude capture. The suspense intensifies as their stories draw closer together. Questions are raised, through the attorney’s investigations that go beyond the pursuit of facts: questions to do with the past of the young hitman and how he ended up earning his living in this way; the role and responsibility of the justice system; and the shady connections between business and the legal world in provincial Peru. As such, the film explores the very contemporary crisis of the Peruvian judiciary system and invites its audience to consider the limitations of the law, particularly the disconnect between state-imposed rules and local circumstances. The attorney is so tired of judicial inefficiency, witness collusion, big business corruption and the tendency of the system to let delinquent criminals go free, that he begins a campaign to bring down a well-known local organized crime group. What the film reveals more broadly is the futility of this campaign, with depth of corruption and disillusionment across the entire legal system and the dominance of an alternative mode of control, one of racketeering and extortion, that—in the manner of the paradigm traced by Verónica Gago (2004)—both adopts and disrupts the neoliberal economic and political model that frames the national psyche, reorganizing notions of obedience and legitimacy. Aesthetically, some aspects of Casos complejos mark a departure from Forero’s earlier work which had been distinguished by a non-invasive camera style, longer takes, a focus on scene-setting via landscape shots and an intensively realistic approach to dialogue. With this later film, the

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more complex plot structure (reminiscent of the multi-narrative format of his award-winning short film) results in a style that is less contemplative and much faster-paced, allowing for multiple perspectives to be presented and paths to be followed, with playful and contrapuntally upbeat music (apparently non-diegetic) that helps fashion a sense of the extraordinary from what might otherwise be considered as rather ordinary low-life delinquent characters. In fact, this and similar aesthetic devices reinforced through the post-production serve to create formal parallels between the two narrative threads, foregrounding their eventual encounter. This element of the soundtrack is revealed as being the classical music of choice for the attorney who listens to it as he ruminates over the case and traces images of guns in his notebook, with cross-cut edits to the young criminal tracing images in the dust as he contemplates his escape: the music thus indicates a link between the fate of the two protagonists. One of the distinctive elements of Forero’s work noted by several Peruvian critics is his use of wry, dark, satirical humour to cast a singular perspective on the world his characters inhabit (Ugarelli 2019). The playful tone is developed from the earliest scenes in Casos complejos when the seemingly non-diegetic upbeat musical soundtrack that accompanies a sequence of extortion and assassination calls into question the seriousness of these acts (Pugliese 2019). In working stylistically in this way to contrast the idealistic attorney with the negligent and corrupt system that constrains his efforts, Forero’s approach aligns with the likes of global auteurs such as the Japanese director Takeshi Kitano (as noted by Delgado 2018), whose own work has been described variously as irreverent, surreal, austere, laconic, melancholic and violent, with moments of poignancy counter-balanced by outbursts of violence, some of which are presented with a comedic tone (Davis 2003), others of which are offered through dry third person narration. In Casos complejos , the dark critique is reserved for the exploration of the lamentably absurd workings of the Peruvian judicial system, and the corrupt, negligent and delinquent culture that has had such a devastating effect on society, both collectively and individually, with particular reference to the contemporary provincial circumstances of a city such as Trujillo, where, as described by one reviewer, “marginality is currency” (Kusmin 2019). The story reveals an organized crime gang, the (real-life) Iracundos, whose members are being watched by the dogged attorney who appears to be the only one of the legal characters who is motivated by wanting to see the group of extortionists and hitmen locked up behind bars: the rest of the judiciary seem

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to turn a blind eye, at best, or, at worst, are quite possibly implicated in the criminality themselves. Forero thus shines a light on the many obstacles experienced by his two protagonists: one who seeks justice at all costs, including to his personal safety, and the other who is determined to thwart him in a mission that becomes a much larger endeavour of exposing and opposing the absurdity of “state disinterest and endemic corruption” (Delgado 2018) and which ends in utter disillusionment (Fig. 7.2). In parallel, then, the story of Yonatan (the young hitman) is shown through dispersed flashback scenes and moments, including his early life with a violent father and, later, in reform institutions. This character develops further the director’s preoccupation with youth delinquency and disillusionment, into the world of violent organized crime. It is a hopeless portrayal of marginalized youth that is familiar throughout much of Latin America and already popularized on screen from classics like Luis Buñuel’s Los olvidados [The Young and the Damned] (1950) from Mexico through to more contemporary regional successes such as Cidade de Deus [City of God] (2003) from Brazil. In his own exploration of good versus evil, Forero strays beyond the crime thriller format and into Western genre territory, with Bardales the attorney as the old-fashioned sheriff fixated on righting wrongs from the perspective of law and order institutions

Fig. 7.2 The district attorney Bardales makes his case

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located in the city centre, while the gang members take command of the dusty margins of the same city, terrorizing the neighbourhoods with their protection “service”, protected themselves by the corrupt justice system. The interplay between the topical and the perennial is emphasized: while local jargon fills the dialogue and the specific references to familiar places are scattered throughout the mise-en-scene (including a visual reference to Chicama on the bus which provides Yonatan the means to escape in the earliest sequence), the broad themes of this film which have to do with the breakdown of social structures due to economic crisis and political abandonment are universal, and are bound to connect with audiences everywhere.

Finding an Audience: Completing the Cycle of Cinematic Production By Peruvian standards, the production journey for this fourth feature from Forero was quite short, lasting four years from origination to exhibition. The director began work on the project by researching the initial idea in 2014. He then wrote the script and with that won Ministry of Culture awards established to support fiction features made outside Lima.10 He filmed in 2016 and completed post-production in 2017, with a premiere screening at Lima Film Festival in 2018.11 In common with his earlier work ethic, Forero remained committed to creating a sense of authenticity and interviewed many different people during the research phase, including a member of the Judiciary for Complex Cases (from where the film takes its title). For this project, Forero also created a new production company that he called Cine de barrio [neighborhood cinema], with the broader aim of training young people in Trujillo to create cinema. He brought together a group who were interested in cinema, for workshops and practical exercises. Many of them then worked as technical assistants on the film, and in the end only the directors of cinematography and sound came from outside Trujillo, further demonstrating Forero’s commitment to developing local talent and telling local stories. In terms of exhibition, this film gained important exposure on the festival circuit throughout 2018 and 2019, a route to commercial screens that has been adopted by Forero (in common with many Peruvian directors) as a deliberative strategy for reputation-building. It also secured acclaim when it won first place in the national competition of feature length films in the “Cinema Week” at the University of Lima, curated by critic and contributor to this volume, Ricardo Bedoya. Domestic

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distributors showed some interest in securing a more commercial exhibition run, but with additional budget required to support a robust and viable promotional campaign this was looking increasingly unlikely until a sudden breakthrough in mid-October 2019 when a release date was announced for 14 November. This seems likely to have been at least in part as a result of attention garnered via selections at prominent regional festivals such as BAFICI . Held annually in Buenos Aires, Argentina, BAFICI is renowned as a celebration of independent cinema and critics there hailed the director of Casos complejos for having made “outstanding aesthetic choices” (Pugliese 2019) with this film, and for its distinctive blend of political thriller with western style structural format (Kusmin 2019). It was also selected for the Market screening forum of the equally well-regarded Film Festival of Guadalajara (Mexico, 2019), further cementing the director’s position on the international circuit. Only with these external indicators of success, along with a concerted set of negotiations and additional funding for promotion to a national audience has the domestic commercial run been secured. It remains to be seen how well supported it will be by the general public, and whether it will benefit from being screened at the more popular slots over more than a couple of weeks. At the time the domestic release was announced, Forero emphasized a belief that Peruvian cinema needed “to find its audience, without falling into the trap of adopting the facile formulae of commercial films, which falsify situations in order to sell tickets” (11 Oct 2019), that is to say, without presenting a misleading marketing campaign that might seek to emphasize the humour and violence of the film in order to appeal to an audience that might then not appreciate its stylistic nuances and social concerns. The challenge continues to be one of striking a balance between appealing to a mass audience through deploying familiar generic tropes and presenting a relevant and difficult theme with originality, honesty and authenticity. To bring things full circle back to the local, at the time of finalising this essay, Casos complejos is showing at the 2020 edition of the Festival de Cine de Trujillo [FECIT], an event that enjoys increasing prominence and reputation amongst Peruvian cinephiles.

Conclusion While developing a path as an auteur filmmaker with a clear personal style and tone, an appreciation of genre conventions, a trademark commitment to his home region of La Libertad, and a mindset that seeks to draw attention to the challenges for young people left without hope, Forero’s projects also continue to demonstrate an affinity for a collective

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approach to filmmaking. Drawing on his experiences with the aforementioned Guarango company and his work as an educator, the filmmaker has shown a determination to develop a broader capacity for film production expertise in northwestern Peru through basing his company there, running and supporting workshops, and providing opportunities for new filmmakers to find audiences. His current project, a docu-drama provisionally titled Historias de Shipibo which has secured state production funding, is set in the Amazon region, is being developed with support from Guarango’s expertise and facilities, and is being made in collaboration with the local people. Based on the research from his Master of Communication thesis project that was presented for examination at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (PUCP) in Lima in May 2019, the film sets out to analyze and reflect on the changes to Shipibo culture brought about by their migration from the Amazon to urban life, thus disrupting the exotic stereotypical view of the Shipibo communities held by many Peruvians, revealing instead the effects of discrimination and highlighting their creative potential and distinctive worldview. In conclusion, this essay argues that despite an ongoing struggle for an audience that is shared by so many of his compatriots, Omar Forero has secured for himself a position as a highly-regarded cinephile filmmaker who is simultaneously committed to exploring local and topical issues, developing his craft and the talents of others, and embracing a global mindset. Moreover, his own career flow between Trujillo, Lima and the US underscores a disruption of the Lima-versus-provincial dichotomy of filmmaking that has dominated the topography of Peruvian filmmaking since the 1990s. In many ways, with his overt commitment to bringing to the screen the vicissitudes of life for the marginalized of Peru (from the lonely attorney trying to defeat a corrupt judicial system, to the disempowered youth of the provinces and the historically subalternized Amazonian communities), Forero’s innovative filmic work might be considered as “the surface on which the experience of those relegated to the margins of economic circuits and social pathways seeks to be deciphered in new forms” (Rancière 2014, p. 142). Moreover, his experimentally disruptive style demonstrates a further commitment: to the rethinking and reframing of the categories of the “national” and the “global” in cinematic terms. His characters are marked by isolation and estrangement, and his cinema, like his protagonists, becomes a search for alternatives as well as a form of resistance to the expectations of Peruvian national cinema of the twenty-first century.

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Acknowledgement I am very grateful to Omar Forero for providing access to his films for the purpose of this essay. However, I take full responsibility for the views expressed here about his work.

Notes 1. In the Ministry of Culture’s Competition for Cinema Projects 2015, Casos complejos won the main prize in the category of Feature Fiction Project from the Regions. 2. For example, Laslo Rojas, Carlos Esquives, César Guerra Linares and Gisella Barthé all listed Casos complejos as one of their favourite national “festival” films of 2018. See . 3. Forero’s shorts films are: El paquete [The Package] (1998), La vida da vueltas [Life Turns Around] (2000), El bosque de El Cañoncillo [The Forest of El Cañoncillo] (2002), La escuela de la calle [The School on the Street] (2003), Try (2007) and First Roll (2007). 4. Forero recollects in an interview with Cinencuentro in 2007 that he was particularly inspired and motivated by the events that Guarango organized that provided opportunities for video-makers at that time (in the 1990s) to screen their work for the public, thereby finding audiences beyond their group of like-minded university friends. He also benefited from being able to use Guarango’s equipment and facilities for free for his personal projects while working on their projects: . 5. Francisco Lombardi’s Bajo la piel [Under the Skin] (1996) which was set in the Moche Valley, not far from the city of Trujillo on the northern coastal area, might be considered an exception; however this film was, I have argued, far less interested in developing a sense of place and more in the dynamics of the characters and their relationships amidst an exotic background. See Barrow (2007, pp. 81–100). 6. The Global Film Initiative grants up to $10,000 each year to filmmakers “whose works exhibit artistic excellence, strong narrative and a cultural perspective on everyday life”. Chicama also secured a “Special Mention”, along with five other global film projects and used the funding to subsidize the post-production including sound mixing and specialist laboratory costs. Previous Peruvian recipients of the fund include El Inca, la boba y el hijo del ladrón (Ronnie Temoche 2011), Tarata (Fabrizio Aguilar 2009), Octubre (Diego and Daniel Vega 2010) and El acuarelista (Daniel Rodríguez Risco 2008) (Rojas 2012). 7. Previous winners of the prestigious APRECI award include Claudia Llosa’s La teta asustada [The Milk of Sorrow], Héctor Gálvez’s Paraíso [Paradise] and Rosario García-Montero’s Las malas intenciones [Bad

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8.

9.

10.

11.

Intentions], all films that went on to enjoy considerable success on the global film circuit. Retina Latina is an open access online platform which has featured highlights of Latin American cinema since 2016. The project was developed by cinema enterprises based in Ecuador, Peru, Mexico, Uruguay y Colombia, and has drawn on the support of the Interamerican Development Bank for implementation. It also secured finances from the International Fund for Cultural Diversity (FIDC) administered by UNESCO. According to its website blurb, the platform emerged with the aim of meeting the needs of distribution and exhibition of cinematographic works, thereby overcoming some of the most significant challenges for the region. As of summer 2019, there were 88 thousand users registered on the platform and more than 260 films available there. Nineteen of these were Peruvian—shorts and features—available for free across Latin America and the Caribbean (www.retinalatina.org). See, for example, Deborah Shaw (2015) on ‘The Three Amigos’ of contemporary Mexican cinema and Stephanie Dennison (2013) on the national, transnational and post-national of filmmaking in Spanish and Latin American film, for extensive discussions and references on this important and relevant topic that are used in this essay to situate Forero as a global director of the twenty-first century. In addition to the Production Prize for Fiction Cinema by Regional filmmakers, Forero also won the first prize in the Ministry of Culture’s Cine del Mañana funding scheme, 2017, beating six other projects to receive $5000 dollars from the sponsor EGEDA Peru (a company that supports intellectual property for audiovisual producers) and postproduction support including transfer to DCP and Bluray, from Guarango Films. Forero worked again with Guarango Films on the post-production; his award from the Cine del Mañana fund supported the costs of the creation of a high quality digital master copy.

Works Cited Anon., 2007. Entrevista con Omar Forero. Cinencuentro [online] 28 May. Available at: [Accessed 14 October 2019]. Anon., 2012. El Ordenador de Omar Forero ganó el premio APRECI a la mejor película peruana del Festival Lima Independiente 2012. Dirección del audiovisual, la fonografía y los nuevos medios [online]. Available at: [Accessed 14 October 2019]. Anon., 2019. Omar Forero, cineasta y docente UPN, estrena película Casos complejos [online] 25 October. Available at: [Accessed 31 October 2019]. Bajo la piel [Under the Skin], 1996. [film] Directed by Francisco Lombardi. Peru, Spain, Germany: Inca Films S.A., Pandora Filmproduktion, Tornasol Films. Barreto, R., 2018. Entrevista con Omar Forero. La República [online] 16 August. Available at: [Accessed 14 October 2019]. Barrow, S., 2007. Violence, Nation and Peruvian Cinema: A Critical Analysis of Bajo la Piel (Francisco Lombardi, 1996). In: V. Carpenter, ed. 2007. A World Torn Apart: Representations of Violence in Latin American Narrative. Oxford: Peter Lang in association with the University of St. Andrews and the Institute of European Cultural Identity Studies. pp. 81–100. Bustamante, E. and Victoria, J. L., 2017. Las miradas múltiples: el cine regional peruano. Lima: Universidad de Lima. Casos complejos [Complex Cases], 2018. [film] Directed by Omar Forero. Peru: Cine del Barrio. Chicama, 2012. [film] Directed by Omar Forero. Peru: X Comunicación Alternativa. Cidade de Deus [City of God], 2003. [film] Directed by Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund. Brazil, France, and Germany: O2 Filmes, VideoFilmes and GloboFilmes. Davis, B., 2003. Great Directors: Kitano, Takeshi. Sense of Cinema [online]. Available at: [Accessed 22 July 2019]. Delgado, M., 2018. Panorama: Casos complejos de Omar Forero. Desistfilm [online]. Available at: [Accessed 22 July 2019]. Delgado, M., 2019. Ley de cine: apuntes para lograr un cine peruano de calidad. Ideele Revista [online]. Available at: [Accessed 6 November 2019]. Dennison, S., 2013. National, Transnational and Post-National: Issues in Contemporary Film-Making in the Hispanic World. In. S. Dennison, ed. 2013. Contemporary Hispanic Cinema: Interrogating the Transnational in Spanish and Latin American Film. Martlesham and Rochester: Boydell and Brewer. pp. 1–24.

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El acuarelista, 2008. [film] Directed by Daniel Rodríguez Risco. Peru: Cinecorp SAC. El bosque de El Cañoncillo [The Forest of El Cañoncillo], 2002. [film] Directed by Omar Forero. Peru: X Comunicación Alternativa. El Inca, la boba y el hijo del ladrón, 2011. [film] Directed by Ronnie Temoche. Peru: Cine Moche, Perfo Studio, Universidad Alas Peruanas. El ordenador [The Organizer], 2012. [film] Directed by Omar Forero. Peru: X Comunicación Alternativa. El paquete [The Package], 1998. [film] Directed by Omar Forero. Peru: X Comunicación Alternativa. Elsaesser, T., 2019. European Cinema and Continental Philosophy: Film as Thought Experiment. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Esquives, C., 2013. Chicama, siguiendo la ruta de contemplación de Omar Forero. Cinencuentro [online] 18 September. Available at: [Accessed 29 July 2019]. Gago, V., 2004. Neoliberalism from Below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economics. Translated by L. Mason-Deese. 2017. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Hjort, M., 2000. Themes of Nation. In: M. Hjort and S. Mackenzie, eds. 2000. Cinema and Nation. London and New York: Routledge. Japón, 2002. [film] Directed by Carlos Reygadas. Mexico: No Dream Cinema, Mantarraya Producciones. Jeong, S. and Szaniawski, J. eds., 2016. The Global Auteur: The Politics of Authorship in 21st Century Cinema. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Kusmin, N., 2019. Casos complejos. OtrosCines [online]. Available at: [Accessed 14 October 2019]. La escuela de la calle [The School on the Street], 2003. [film] Directed by Omar Forero. Peru: X Comunicación Alternativa. La teta asustada [The Milk of Sorrow], 2009. [film] Directed by Claudia Llosa. Peru-Spain: Generalitat de Catalunya - Institut Català de les Indústries Culturals (ICIC), Ministerio de cultura, Oberón cinematográfica, Televisió de Catalunya (TV3), Televisión española (TVE), Vela producciones, and Wanda visión S.A. La vida da vueltas [Life Turns Around], 2000. [film] Directed by Omar Forero. Peru: X Comunicación Alternativa. Las malas intenciones [Bad Intentions], 2011. [film] Directed by Rosario GarcíaMontero. Peru, Argentina, and Germany: Barry Films and Garmont Films. Lie, N., 2017. The Latin American (Counter-) Road Movie and Ambivalent Modernity. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Los actores [The Actors], 2006. [film] Directed by Omar Forero. Peru: X Comunicación Alternativa.

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Los muertos [The Dead], 2004. [film] Directed by Lisandro Alonso. Argentina, France, Netherlands, and Switzerland: 4L, Fortuna Films, Slot Machine. Los olvidados [The Young and the Damned], 1950. Directed by Luis Buñuel. Mexico: Ultramar Films. Lucanamarca, 2008. [film] Directed by Héctor Gálvez. Peru: TV Cultura Perú. Octubre [October], 2010. [film] Directed by Diego and Daniel Vega. Peru: Fractal Communications and Maretazo cine. Paraíso [Paradise], 2009. [film] Directed by Héctor Gálvez. Peru: Chullachaki producciones, Neue Cameo Film, and Oasis producciones cinematográficas. Pugliese, J. P., 2019. Justicia para nadie. Escribiendo cine [online]. Available at: [Accessed 14 October 2019]. Rancière, J., 2014. The Intervals of Cinema. Translated from French by J. Howe. London: Verso. Redacción Lucidez, 2019. Casos complejos: película que aborda la lucha contra la corrupción anuncia su estreno nacional. Lucidez [online], 11 October. Available at: [Accessed 14 October 2019]. Rojas, L., 2012. Filme peruano Chicama gana el Fondo del Global Film Initiative. Cinencuentro [online] 4 April. Available at: [Accessed 14 October 2019]. Shaw, D., 2015. The Three Amigos: The Transnational Filmmaking of Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro González Iñárritu, and Alfonso Cuarón. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Shohat, E. and Stam, R., 2003. Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Tarata, 2009. [film] Directed by Fabrizio Aguilar. Peru: Ciné-Sud Promotion, Cromauno audiovisuales, and Luna Llena Films. Try, 2007. [film] Directed by Omar Forero. Peru: X Comunicación Alternativa. Ugarelli, J. C., 2019. Entre Tinieblas: Midsommar y Casos complejos. Revista Cocktail [online] 14 November. Available at: [Accessed 14 January 2020].

CHAPTER 8

Wiñaypacha by Oscar Catacora: Overcoming Indigenismo Through Intimacy and Slowness Maria Chiara D’Argenio

Wiñaypacha [Eternity] (2017) is the first feature-length film by Óscar Catacora, a young filmmaker from the Puno region, in the Peruvian highlands. The film, shot on location at the feet of the Allincapac mountain near Puno, tells the story of an elderly Aymara couple living alone in a very remote rural area, and is spoken entirely in the Aymara language. In the heterogenous and multicultural Peru, this very “regional” film has been greeted with enthusiasm. Wiñaypacha received the Ministry of Culture award at the 2017 Lima Film Festival, where it premiered. In 2018, it was selected by the DAFO [Direction of Audiovisual, Fonography and New Media] to represent Peru at the next US Academy Awards and Spanish Goya Awards. The film was partially funded by the Ministry of Culture; in 2013, it received a grant of 400,000 Peruvian soles [around 121,000 dollars] aimed at financing film projects from the Peruvian provinces outside Lima and Callao. Its commercial release was also very successful: it was screened in five cinemas in Lima for various

M. C. D’Argenio (B) University College London, London, UK e-mail: m.d’[email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 C. Vich and S. Barrow (eds.), Peruvian Cinema of the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52512-5_8

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weeks, something quite unprecedented for a “regional” Peruvian film. In Puno, where the film’s story is located, it even reached seven screenings per day. According to Claudia Cribillero (2018), Wiñaypacha combined a quality product with a well-planned promotion campaign on social media sustained by the positive response of audience and critics, which secured its constant presence on Facebook and Twitter until March 2018, when the renowned distribution company Tondero started managing its distribution. The critics’ reviews were unanimously positive, as summarized by a journalist from El Comercio in August 2017: Ricardo Bedoya considered it a film “without antecedents” marking “a milestone in Peruvian cinema”, while for Claudio Cordero its presence was a “miracle” for national cinema, and for Alberto Castro it was “the best Peruvian film in years” (in García 2018). Such a positive reception is noteworthy considering that, although there is now significant filmmaking activity in Peruvian regions, Limabased production is still dominant in the national film circuit. As critics have noted, Wiñaypacha is part of the so-called cine regional, “the most important movement in recent Peruvian cinema” (Bustamante and Luna Victoria 2017, p. 21). The problem is, as other critics maintain, that most of these regional films do not reach the film festival circuit or the movie theatres. The commercial and critic success of films such as Wiñaypacha or the acclaimed Retablo (2018), by Álvaro Delgado-Aparicio (shot in Ayacucho and spoken almost entirely in Quechua), are signs that these power dynamics are finally shifting. Wiñaypacha’s success is even more remarkable when considering Peruvian ethnic and social complexity. While in the last census (2017), nearly fourteen million people identified as mestizo and nearly six million people as indigenous (of these, over five million as Quechua and over five hundred thousand as Aymara), the term serrano [from the highlands] is still synonymous with “Indian”, both frequently used as insults (Méndez 2011, p. 53) since racism is still dominant in contemporary Peru. The success of Wiñaypacha seems to lie both in its cinematic qualities and its cultural significance. Critics have highlighted the newness of the film’s aesthetics mentioning its contemplative style that recalls certain traditions of Japanese cinema and Italian neorealism. Its “uniqueness” concerns also the way in which it approaches the Andean world: according to Monica Delgado, Wiñaypacha begins a new chapter in the representation of the Andean world in Peruvian cinema (2018). For Cordero, Wiñaypacha (like Retablo) has revitalized the native language cinema, a tradition that the critic rightly traces back to 1950s–1960s

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Cuzqueño film production (quoted in Anon. 2019). Except for Delgado, however, Peruvian critics have not delved into the features of or reasons for such revitalization, nor have they explained in detail why this film is aesthetically and culturally innovative. This chapter aims to fill this gap by situating the film in a very local and at the same time global context. In fact, it might be argued that what Cordero calls revitalization is part of a broader trend in Latin American cinema which in Peru did not start with Wiñaypacha, but a decade earlier with the (contested) cinema of Claudia Llosa. Since the beginning of the new millennium, a growing number of Latin American films, mostly transnationally co-produced and directed by young non-indigenous filmmakers, have centred on the lives, ethnicities and languages of indigenous people. Examples are the films by Paz Encina, Ciro Guerra, Juan Carlos Valdivia, Jayro Bustamante, among others. Most of them have proved successful in film festivals, perhaps responding to (and/or shaping) Western audiences’ desire for tales of cultural diversity and coinciding with current ecological and environmental concerns. Like these films, Wiñaypacha focuses on indigenous culture and foregrounds real indigenous languages, employs an aesthetics that dialogues with global trends and engages with the political differently from the previous New Latin American Cinema of the 1960s. However, it also differs from them in some key areas. Unlike most of those directors, Catacora identifies as Aymara and, as far as we understand from his interviews, he knows the culture he represents very well, having spent his childhood partly in the company of his Aymara grandparents. In addition, the film engages with local visual and audio-visual traditions. Nevertheless, the revitalization of cinema in indigenous languages is part of a broader panAmerican trend in film culture and seems also to align with current state politics that promote interculturality and cultural diversity. One aim of the Peruvian Ministry of Culture, for example, is to promote, manage and recognize the value of the country’s cultural and ethnic plurality. In Peru, this cinematic trend started with productions such as Madeinusa (2006) and La teta asustada [The Milk of Sorrow] (2009) by Claudia Llosa. While Cordero does not mention Llosa’s work, it must be noted that both of her films focused thematically on Andean cultures; had Andean Quechua-speaking female protagonists (played in both films by the now famous Ayacuchean actress Magaly Solier) and included dialogue and songs in Quechua. Llosa’s films were very successful in specialized

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circles; La teta asustada was even awarded the Golden Bear at the Berlinale. They certainly bestowed an unprecedented visibility on Peruvian indigenous populations and actors. Charlotte Gleghorn has noted that “[p]rior to Llosa’s work […] few indigenous protagonists had made it to the silver screen, let alone the Berlinale”, and has also highlighted the “potential agency star actress Magaly Solier has exercised in her involvement with the productions” (2017, p. 179). This is relevant especially considering that despite the large indigenous population, Peru, as Gleghorn writes, “is generally regarded as out of step with the overall pattern of [indigenous] film production that has accompanied the rise of the Indigenous movements” in Latin America since the 1990s, perhaps mirroring the low level of “ethnic mobilization in the region” (2017, p. 179) when compared to other regions. Llosa’s cinema, however, generated a heated debate in Peru on account of the ways it represents the Andean population, which, for some critics has been problematic in that it has reactivated old tropes of indigeneity and colonialist imaginary (D’Argenio 2013). The polarized discussion triggered by Madeinusa, for example (which also extended to the international academic community) was a sign not only of a sensitive subject in the Peruvian public sphere, but also of how difficult it is to undermine Eurocentric representations. Going back to earlier filmic representations of indigenous populations, including Llosa’s, might help to understand the significance of Wiñaypacha within Peruvian cultural production. In what follows, I analyze, first, how the film dialogues with Peruvian cinematic indigenismo and reformulates indigenista tropes through a focus on intimacy; and, second, how the film engages with “slow cinema” and the function of its aesthetics of slowness.

Andean Indigenous Representation Beyond Folklore and Authenticity Llosa’s films, despite their aesthetic quality and originality, offer a problematic representation of Peru’s ethnically heterogeneous society informed by unquestioned binaries of urban progress versus rural backwardness, and codified tropes of indigeneity that bind the indigenous population with the past, with stasis and/or with victimhood, along with an exoticist gaze (D’Argenio 2013). While critics such as Iliana PaganTeitelbaum (2008) and Cynthia Vich (2014) have associated Llosa’s exoticist gaze to a false ethnography and to the aestheticization and

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commodification of choledad, respectively, I have maintained that the films’ representation of the Andean world is rooted in Peruvian indigenista and proto-indigenista literary and visual discourses of the Andean world. I return now to the concept of indigenismo to explore the claim made by Catacora that indigenista works were a key source of inspiration and argue that a comparison with previous indigenista films demonstrates the innovative extent of Wiñaypacha’s representation of the Aymara culture. Peruvian Indigenismo was an early twentieth century socio-political and intellectual movement that vindicated “Indian” society, sought the “resurgence of the Andean culture” (López Lenci 2004, p. 699) and forged proposals of regional and national identity rooted in Pre-Columbian culture. Indigenismo refers also to a range of artistic expressions (literature, art, dance, performances, theatre, music), which arose between the 1920s and 1950s and centred on Inca and Indigenous Andean culture and population. Some of those played an important role in the development of “longings for a regional, national, and continental identity”, as Zoila Mendoza (2008) explains in relation to Cuzqueño folklore, while others were apolitical and aestheticist, as Natalia Majluf (1997) states in relation to the visual production of painter José Sabogal. In Peruvian literature, indigenismo was a dominant trend for decades. Literary scholars usually differentiate two stages of indigenista literature: the 1920s–1940s indigenismo, characterized by dichotomic and distant representations of an indigenous population either idealized or victimized, and the neoindigenismo of the 1950s and beyond, which engaged more deeply with both the situation of indigenous populations and their culture (Cornejo Polar 1984). Unlike in other arts, Peruvian cinema has not embraced indigenismo as a major trend to the same extent. It was not until the late 1950s when a group of Cuzqueño intellectuals and professionals (among them, Manuel and Víctor Chambi, Eulogio Nishiyama and Luis Figueroa) used cinema to vindicate Andean culture and investigate local indigenous traditions; they founded the Cine Club Cuzco in 1955. According to Bedoya, their films “showed for the first time in Peruvian cinema the presence of the Andes and its inhabitants” while developing a stable filmmaking activity outside of Lima (2013, p. 135). Like the indigenista artists and intellectuals, the filmmakers were (mostly) non-indigenous middle-class intellectuals and professionals that sought to represent an Andean indigenous rural culture to which they did not belong.1 Cornejo Polar proposed

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long ago the concept of “heterogeneity” to describe this conflictive dimension of indigenista literature, while Majluf employs the term “paradoxical” referring to indigenista artists’ appropriation of the “Indian” because they “presented the Indian as the paradigm of the authentic nationality, as the origin […] of the national culture, while admitting that they were not part of that collectivity” (1997, p. 249). These filmmakers shot mainly documentaries of regional folklore and produced films that merged the fictional and factual, such as Kukuli (1961), which combines the fictionalization of a Quechua mythological tale with documentary scenes of local folklore. In fact, Wiñaypacha’s director has claimed to be inspired by Kukuli, by indigenista literature and by the photography of Martín Chambi (an indigenous photographer associated with indigenismo and the father of Manuel and Víctor Chambi). Yet, despite this claim, Wiñaypacha offers a portrayal of the Andes that overcomes indigenista conventions. This is not simply because Catacora identifies as Aymara and, therefore, his work is not “heterogenous” in the sense of Cornejo Polar’s term, but also because his film does not enact binaries and tropes that have characterized both the indigenista works and the mainstream notions of indios and serranos in Peru. Instead, Wiñaypacha highlights the individual traits of indigenous people, and poses the “Indian problem”, to use José Carlos Mariátegui’s famous expression (1928), on new terms: not as a local socio-economic problem, but as a global issue concerning ageing, rural life, and the lives at the fringes of capitalism. Wiñaypacha was shot on location at the feet of the Allincapac mountain (an “Apu” [sacred mountain and mountain spirit] for Quechua and Aymara indigenous populations) in the Macusani district, in what the director has described as challenging conditions due to the cold temperatures and the elevated height of more than 5000 meters above sea level. The shooting was preceded by a long preparation for the acting of the two Aymara non-professional actors: Rosa Nina (who had never seen a film before) and the director’s own grandfather, Vicente Catacora. They play the campesinos Phaxsi and Willka, the only human subjects that appear on the screen. The film tells the story of this elderly peasant couple, who live in their small chacra [farm], a typical Aymara dwelling with a few animals, in a very remote and isolated area of the Peruvian highlands. Catacora employs a still camera to portray in a neorealist fashion the couple’s daily life, made of “quotidian microevents”: threshing, making potato starch, knitting ponchos, chewing coca leaves, performing rituals and religious

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ceremonies. The dialogue is spoken entirely in Aymara and there is no diegetic or extra-diegetic music, the soundtrack only consisting of the sounds of nature. Because of their age and loneliness as well as the rigidity of the puna, they are portrayed as vulnerable, a condition epitomised by the fire that destroys their house leading eventually to Willka’s death. Left alone, Phaxsi decides to leave; in the last sequence, she walks towards the mountain in a symbolic act of re-joining nature. While Nina and Catacora are the only actors, there are two more characters in this film. One is Antuku, the couple’s absent son, whom they repeatedly and nostalgically mention. The other is the landscape of the Andean Peruvian highlands, which fills most of the images visually articulating the important role of nature in Aymara culture and the notion of earth as a living being. The importance of this landscape is established early on through dialogue and cinematography. The first image is a still frame of Andean landscape, with the sacred mountain in the background. Cut to another still frame: a long shot of the house, establishing a precise hierarchy and a bond between the human subjects and the natural environment. We are then introduced to the couple. There is a still frame of a medium shot of the house; we hear the off-screen voice of Willka calling his wife, who subsequently appears, walking slowly, aided by a stick, crossing the door. Then we see the two of them performing a ritual to the Pachamama [mother earth] to invoke fertility in the fields. The trope of the absent child is also articulated in the first minutes as the couple mention that their son has emigrated to the city leaving them alone; now old and tired, they wait for his return. These initial scenes recall the beginning of Kukuli. That film starts with a set of still (albeit shaky) frames of the Andean highlands, after which we see an isolated small choza [hut] and an indigenous man calling his grand-daughter Kukuli (played by Figueroa’s sister, the mestizo Judith Figueroa). However, the differences are soon evident. While Wiñaypacha does not offer any visual, sound or narrative element that functions as a bridge between Aymara and non-Aymara culture, Kukuli mediates the representation of Quechua Andean culture through a masculine authoritative voice-over that reads a text (written by the intellectual Sebastián Salazar Bondy) which introduces and explains, in a formal and literary Spanish rich in metaphors, what the spectator sees. The choza is presented as “a drop of life amidst solitude” and the two elderly characters as Inca descendants who chew “the coca of patience”. Kukuli is idealized through images and text; she lives in close contact with nature (surrounded by vegetation, she bathes in the river and speaks to a llama) while being

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described as an archetype: as an “eternal woman, immobile at the origin of love and life” with a “native grace”. As the film progresses, the voice-over comments on Andean material culture (dress, masques, chulpas [Aymara funerary towers]), rituals (coca chewing, chicha [corn drink] drinking), possessions (sheep and llamas) and public forms of expression (dances, carnival). This narration constructs a typified Andean collective identity which encompasses both the “melancholic Indian” and the “festive Indian”, two stereotypes that, according to Marisol De la Cadena (2004), were elaborated by indigenista discourse. Critics have compared Wiñaypacha to Kukuli arguing that the former, unlike the latter, does not present the pitfalls of indigenismo. For Bustamante, Kukuli “vindicates indigenous culture from the perspective of Andean urban intellectuals and artists who wanted to assume a hegemonic role within a specific idea of nation”, while Wiñaypacha “is the film of the sons and nephews of those whom indigenismo aimed to represent” (2017). According to Delgado, the key issue lies in the films’ portrayal of indigenous “symbolic and cosmogonic imaginaries”; unlike Kukuli, which uses a “documentary way of filming” that produces a “reductionist” approach, Wiñaypacha manages to merge myth, realism and fiction, incorporating “symbolisms, analogies or mythical aspects” within the documentary style, without affecting the level of realism of the on-screen representation (2018). The issue highlighted by Delgado is indeed a crucial element in both films. Expanding on her reading, my analysis centres on the very different ways in which the two films deal with documentary and folklore in order to represent Andean identity. In Kukuli, the young female protagonist embarks on a journey of “coming of age and discovery of the cultural environment” (Bedoya 2013, p. 136): the story starts when Kukuli leaves her grandparents to participate in the celebrations of the Mamacha Carmen/Virgen del Carmen at Paucartambo, a village in the Cuzco region. On her journey, she falls in love with a man (Alaku) and goes to Paucartambo with him. Here, Kukuli is seen by an “Ukuko”, a mythological figure half man and half bear, who takes her away and kills her, but who is subsequently killed by the village’s people, led by the priest. In fact, the Ukuko is seen as an (indigenous) diabolic being whose presence is caused by human sins. The film ends with the images of two llamas named Kukuli and Alaku, presented as the reincarnation of the young couple finally reunited.

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In line with early indigenista representational matters, Kukuli employs a regional allegory which posits the young, innocent, naïve and victimized Kukuli as representative of Andean women, if not of the Andean population. It also enacts significantly uneven power dynamics through the character of the priest leading the peasants’ revolt. These patterns, alongside the politics of casting, seem to undermine other important strategies that seek to produce a transcultural film: the use of local myths, Quechua language and the shooting of regional folklore. The employ of local folklore, that is, “the stories, songs, customs, rituals and proverbs which shaped the collective spirit of a particular ‘people’” (Rowe and Schelling 1994, p. 4) is particularly relevant. In Latin America, folklore has been both “a kind of bank where authenticity is safely stored’ and ‘a way of referring to contemporary cultures which articulate alternatives to existing power structures” (Rowe and Schelling 1994, p. 4). In Kukuli both functions apply, although the film seems to focus more on the former than on the latter, like many indigenista works which were defined by the “discourse of authenticity emerging from romantic nationalism” (Majluf 1995, p. 7).2 In addition, while indigenista “folkorization”, as Mendoza argues, “has proved essential to the promotion of […] identities” in Latin America (2008, pp. 6–7) and was a site of interaction between the indigenous and non-indigenous subjects; in Kukuli, the representation of folklore, combined with the idealized and archetypical portrayal of femininity and indigeneity, essentializes Andean culture through the notion of authenticity and minimizes the differences between local communities. Wiñaypacha instead privileges crafting individual over collective identities: stories, songs, customs and rituals are identity markers not presented as public forms of expressions, but rather as cultural practices shaping the private and daily life of Phaxsi and Willka. At the beginning, the couple carries out religious ceremonies where they drink and dance; later on, Willka plays the Andean flute. Throughout the film, they perform different rituals (to invoke fertility, to celebrate the New Year) and carry out rural and artisanal labour (the knitting of ponchos ). Through the couple’s activities, the film renders the features of Aymara culture: the cult of agriculture and death is represented through rural labour, rituals and the apachetas rock piles; the bond of Aymara populations to their territory is represented by the Apus; the rituals to the pachamama and the couple’s conception of humanized animals and earth beings. The film refers to Aymara religion and symbolism also through the characters’

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names: Willka means Sun and Phaxsi means Moon, while Antuku means “Star that no longer shines”. However, for the main part, Phaxsi and Willka are represented as individuals who are facing ageing and solitude, who talk harmoniously about their daily chores, past shared experiences and their own relationship. The film thus constructs the subjectivities of these elderly people, shaped by their indigenous Aymara culture, but not essentialized as allegories of a homogenous Aymara identity. Documentary qualities are far from being absent, but rather than use an ethnographic observational approach that focuses on collective folklore, as in Kukuli, they derive from a neorealist style that focuses on intimacy and on acts of “speaking in a low tone, suitable to confidences” (Gide 1896, quoted in Anon.), which is achieved through mise-en-scene, casting, lighting and an emphasis on still frames and medium/long shots over close-ups. Two further elements that overcome indigenista limitations are the absence of the binary coast vs. sierra and the characterization of the Andean subject. In Peru, the construction of the modern state was accompanied by a racialization of geography whereby the coast and Lima, the capital, were associated with modernity and progress, and the Andes with the rural and backwardness (De la Cadena 2004, p. 38). The binary coast-Andes perception informs both early indigenista works and the ever-persistent derogatory notion of serrano. From late nineteenthcentury novels such as Aves sin nido [Birds Without a Nest] (1889) through recent film productions such as Madeinusa, the binary urban– rural node has proved an enduring rhetorical strategy often combined with the representation of an external gaze through the character of a forastero [foreigner] who arrives in the Andes. By focusing solely on the Aymara couple and by eliminating the presence (on and off screen) of the capital Lima, Wiñaypacha manages to undermine the power hierarchies associated with the coast-sierra dichotomy. Although it is indeed mentioned that Antuku has emigrated to the city, the latter is never seen on screen and is not named. The film, therefore, does not impose on the spectator a univocal way of reading Phaxsi and Willka’s reality. By eliminating such a charged point of comparison (the modern capital Lima), the film avoids the notion of “backwardness” and of an Andean racialized geography, both so crucial in colonialist and Eurocentric constructions of identity in Peru. Critics such as Juan José Beteta interpret the absence of an on-screen encounter between the West and non-West as a limitation. According to him, Wiñaypacha fails in its declared intention of

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promoting interculturality since the presence of multiculturalism and cultural hybridity is reduced (2018). Instead, I suggest that this is one of the ways in which the film problematizes the very notion of a Eurocentrically defined Other. Wiñaypacha also manages to eschew the dominant stereotype of the “melancholic Indian”, which in Peruvian cultural history has been both a rhetorical strategy of domination (Morong Reyes 2014) and a feature of the ideal Indian created by the indigenistas . Whether linked to an alleged Indian nature prone to subjugation or to the indigenous populations’ unjust history of dispossession, melancholy was conceived as a trait of an essentialized Indianness. Chambi’s well-known Tristeza andina (1933) visually (and textually, through the title) articulates this notion. While the photography of Wiñaypacha partly draws on the indigenista sublime and/or bucolic imagery of the Andean territory represented in images such as Tristeza andina, the film does not express the meanings historically associated with such imagery and notions as Indian melancholy. The film’s overall “melancholic” mood is not linked to an essentialized Aymara identity, but rather to the conditions of isolation and abandonment of Phaxsi and Willka. Furthermore, the characters do not fit neatly with the trope of the melancholic Indian; notwithstanding the austerity and the tragic events they face, Willka persists in encouraging his wife optimistically, telling her that they will find a solution to their difficulties.

Slowness, Indigeneity and the Political Wiñaypacha’s title has been translated into English as Eternity. As the director states, the translation does not render fully the meaning of the Aymara word, which rather means tiempo eterno [eternal time], an expression that evokes the Aymara conception of the cyclic nature of time. Despite its limitations, however, the translation does retain an important notion of the original Aymara, namely, that of an “extended” tempo, of an “infinite” temporality, which can be thought of as a disruption of, or at least a departure from, dominant Western notions of linear temporalities and the hegemonic narratives of progress associated to them. The title (and its translation) foregrounds the dominant temporal mood of the film, one of a “dilated” temporality, of lengthy duration and waiting. This is achieved both formally and thematically. Formally, the exclusive use of still frames erases camera movement; the mise-en-scene is simple and dominated by the natural environment whose slow pace is shown by

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the clouds moving, the small rivers flowing, the vegetation moved by the wind; the little emotional expressivity and the minimal movements of the actors who spend a lot of time seated, observing, carrying out small and repetitive actions, talk little and prolong the sound of each word. All this contributes to this slow or extended temporality. In terms of narrative, “little” happens and “little” is said; the spectator’s own perception of temporality is confronted with an uneventful tranquillity for a large part of the film. The temporality of the film is shaped also by waiting and cyclical elements, both of which are articulated through the trope of the absent child. Throughout the film, the couple mentions Antuku recurrently. This trope has in fact several functions: to construct the film’s temporality; to show the protagonists’ vulnerability; to allow the staging of premonitory dreams presented as a feature of their indigenous identity and to articulate the key theme of the film, namely, the abandonment of the rural areas by young generations while also alluding to the complexities of the process of deculturation and acculturation when Phaxsi tells that the migrant Antuku felt ashamed by his Aymara language. This aesthetics of slowness might lead one to argue that Wiñaypacha reinforces old tropes of indigeneity such as the “binaries erected between the local and the global, stasis and movement, and dwelling and migration” (Gleghorn 2017, p. 167). However, I contend that not only does Wiñaypacha eschew old binaries, but that its aesthetics of slowness and its temporality are in fact the elements whereby the film engages with Aymara indigeneity and expresses its political dimension. In Aymara culture, past and future are not sequential. As Javer Lajo explains, “Time, in our culture, is not symbolically represented as an ‘arrow’, as it is in the West, but rather, as a zig-zag, like a ‘thunderbolt’ or the ‘trace of the serpent’; […] time flows from the inside to the outside and returns from the outside to the inside, in permanent cycles” (2016). In the “Wiñaya Pacha” or eternal time’, Lajo states “one unfolds ‘forward’ but also ‘backwards’, ‘externally’, but also ‘internally’” (2016). This affects the conception of the cycle of life: “For the Aymara, life is conceived of as eternal in the Pacha [universe]”, death is not the end, but the “continuation” of life, a pasaje-viaje [passage-journey] after which one returns to the real life (Valdivia 2006, p. 2); moreover, unlike Western thought, in Aymara culture and language, space and time are not two separate entities: in Quechua and Aymara languages, one word—pacha—designates both space and time (Lajo 2016).

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The type of temporality of Wiñaypacha is not dissimilar from the temporality of the cinematic trend called “slow cinema”. Slow films are, according to Matthew Flanagan, characterized by “the employment of (often extremely) long takes, de-centred and understated modes of storytelling, and a pronounced emphasis on quietude and the everyday” (quoted in De Luca and Barradas Jorge 2015, p. 1). Other characteristics include “silence” and “stillness” as well as “static camerawork”, an “attention to narratively insignificant incidents” and “settings devoid of human presence present” (De Luca and Barradas Jorge 2015, p. 7). Wiñaypacha’s use of a still camera and contemplative landscape imagery, reduced dialogue and action, repetitions and waiting fit well with such a genre. Catacora himself has declared in interviews that his style is indebted to the cinema of Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu, the latter being a key representative of slow cinema. The relevance of this linkage, however, does not lie in the shared stylistic aspects, but rather in the political implications of slowness on screen. This is a contested notion. Several film theorists defend that slow films are political because, through their focus on alternative temporalities, inverted speeds and the realities and lives of the marginalized, they question mainstream narrative forms and interrogating “well-established notions of aesthetic and cultural worthiness what is worthy of being shown, for how long it is worth being shown” (De Luca and Barradas Jorge 2015, p. 14). Furthermore, according to Karl Schoonover, slow films’ emphasis on wasted time and “uneconomical temporalities” interrogates capitalism and what “counts as productive labor” (2012, pp. 66–67). In the same line, Eva K. Romero argues in her analysis of the Paraguayan film Hamaca Paraguaya [Paraguayan Hammock] (2006), that film slowness may be a “site for resistance” (p. 3). Nevertheless, other critics defend the way that slow films in fact idealize pre-industrial and rural lifestyles often avoiding engaging with the complexities of contemporaneity (De Luca and Barradas Jorge 2015, p. 15). Considering what I have argued so far, Wiñaypacha’s slowness can be interpreted as a site of resistance since it foregrounds a notion of indigenous temporality different from, and opposed to, the dominant Western one, and crafts an idea of Aymara indigeneity. The film’s temporality also brings into question the notions and values of labour, productivity, progress and capitalism. Like other slow films, Wiñaypacha’s time does not correspond to the time of capitalism which is “produced, measured

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and controlled by and through productivity and labor” (Romero 2012, p. 314). Phaxsi and Willka’s agrarian labour is pre-industrial and precapitalist; theirs is a traditional subsistence agriculture whose time is regulated by nature and natural forces (an example is the wind needed for the threshing). The film, however, does more than question the hegemony of capitalist productivity or foreground ecological time; moreover, it neither idealizes the pre-industrial as a lost Eden, nor ignores current issues. Instead, Wiñaypacha exposes the situation of contemporary Peru, in which there are isolated places where “other” marginal lifestyles and labours exist, while posing the problem of the current abandonment of rural areas and consequent situation of vulnerable ageing subjects. Phaxsi and Willka’s bodies are becoming less and less productive because of the passing of time. They are old and tired, as emphasized in a medium close-up of the couple seated next to each other, resting and chewing coca leaves and looking at the horizon. Their dialogues underline their increasing difficulties: when Willka asks her wife to knit a new poncho for him, she replies that she is too old and hardly sees; Willka claims often to be tired; they both voice their need for their son. Unlike in mainstream Hollywood productions, in Wiñaypacha onscreen labour does not serve an action-driven plot; rather, it is the site of social and political critique. The characters’ bodies, their slowness and slow labour are sites of resistance against dominant economic systems and against the passing of time. Here too, then, slowness has a political dimension. The film seems to ask the spectator to reflect on how elderly peasants can survive in a society driven by capitalism and progress in which their aides are either abandoning them (their family) or nonexistent (state). This political dimension is innovative for several reasons. First, Peruvian cinema has explored at length the process of migration to the cities but not the consequences of this process in the rural areas. Second, it further differentiates Wiñaypacha from the previous Peruvian films commented above: here, the problem is no longer that of forging an idea of authentic nationhood rooted in indigenous culture, such as in the indigenista works, or trying to interpret the ethnic heterogeneity of Peru, like in Llosa’s films; rather, the problem is one of citizenship rights, abandonment of the elderly, visibility and state’s support for and recognition of rural populations who are not at the centre of the political debate and, therefore, of “cultural worthiness”. Therefore, the “Indian problem” nowadays, the film seems to suggest, is not merely socio-economic, as proposed in the seminal essay by Mariátegui evoked at the beginning of

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this chapter; nor simply a local issue (bounded to the history and realities of indigenous ethnicities and the nation-state); it is also a global one affecting broader categories, namely, peasants, the elderly and the rural communities living at the margins of capitalism who are witnessing the abandonment of their lands, and lifestyles, by younger generations. Within the context of Peruvian filmic representations, this film manages to eschew if not undermine persistent tropes regarding Andean indigenous subjects and to propose, from the realm of the symbolic, novel ways of thinking about contemporary Andean cultures.

Notes 1. According to Figueroa (1991), Víctor Chambi was Indigenous, but he did not speak Quechua. The members of the Cine Club Cuzco were all from middle-class/bourgeois Cuzqueño sectors. The producers of Kukuli were from Lima. 2. For a discussion of the notion of authenticity in Kukuli, see Julie Vivier’s thesis (2015).

Works Cited Anon., 2019. Cine en lenguas indígenas tiene décadas en Perú y vuelve por sus fueros. Sputnik [online] 5 March. Available at: [Accessed 20 June 2019]. Bedoya, R., 2013. El cine sonoro en el Perú. Lima: Fondo editorial Universidad de Lima. Beteta, J. J., 2018. Wiñaypacha marca un hito en el cine peruano. Cine Encuentro [online] 20 April. Available at: [Accessed 20 June 2019]. Bustamante, E., 2017. Festival de Lima 2017: La aymara Wiñaypacha remite a Ozu, Kurosawa y Béla Tarr. Cine Encuentro [online] 5 August. Available at: [Accessed 10 June 2019]. Bustamante, E., and Luna Victoria, J., 2017. Las miradas múltiples: el cine regional peruano Lima. Lima: Fondo editorial Universidad de Lima. Cornejo Polar, A., 1984. Sobre el “neoindigenismo” y las novelas de Manuel Scorza. Revista Iberoamericana, 127, pp. 549–557.

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Cribillero, C. 2018. Marketing de Recomendación en el éxito de Wiñaypacha. Claudia Crililleo [online] s.n. Available at: [Accessed 22 June 2019]. D’Argenio, M. C., 2013. A Contemporary Andean Type: The Representation of the Indigenous World in Claudia Llosa’s Films. Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, 8(1), pp. 20–42. De la Cadena, M., 2004. Indígenas mestizos: raza y cultura en el Cuzco. Lima: IEP Ediciones. Delgado, M., 2018. Wiñaypacha: contra la muerte del mito. Desistfilm [online] 24 September. Available at: [Accessed 22 June 2019]. De Luca, T., and Barradas Jorge, N., eds., 2015. Slow Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Figueroa, L., 1991. Interview. In: G. Carbone, ed. 1993. El cine en el Perú: 1950–1972. Testimonios. Lima: Fondo editorial de la Universidad de Lima. García, O., 2018. Wiñaypacha: primera película en aymara gana premios en México [online]. Available at: [Accessed on 12 June 2019]. Gleghorn, C., 2017. Indigenous Filmmaking in Latin America. In: M. Delgado, S. Hart, and R. Johnson, eds. 2017. A Companion to Latin American Cinema. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. pp. 167–186. Hamaca paraguaya [Paraguayan Hammock], 2006. [film] Directed by Paz Encina. Argentina, Netherlands, Paraguay, Austria, France and Germany: Arte France Cinéma, Black Forest Films, Fortuna Films, Lita Stantic producciones, Silencio cine, Slot Machine, and Wanda visión. Kukuli, 1961. [film] Directed by Luis Figueroa, Eulogio Nishiyama and César Villanueva. Peru: Kero Films. Lajo, J., 2016. Pacha y paqha: tiempo y espacio en la filosofía andina. América Latina en movimiento [online] 24 June. Available at: [Accessed 12 June 2019]. La teta asustada [The Milk of Sorrow], 2009. [film] Directed by Claudia Llosa. Peru-Spain: Generalitat de Catalunya—Institut Català de les Indústries Culturals (ICIC), Ministerio de cultura, Oberón cinematográfica, Televisió de Catalunya (TV3), Televisión española (TVE), Vela producciones, and Wanda visión S.A. López Lenci, Y., 2004. El Cuzco, paqarina moderna: cartografía de una modernidad e identidades en los Andes peruanos (1900–1935). Lima: UNMSM. Madeinusa, 2006. [film] Directed by Claudia Llosa. Perú and Spain: Oberán cinematográfica, Vela producciones, Wanda visión.

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Majluf, N., 1995. The Creation of the Image of the Indian in 19th-Century Peru: The Paintings of Francisco Laso (1823–1869). Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin. Majluf, N., 1997. Nacionalismo e Indigenismo en el arte americano. In: R. Gutiérrez Viñuales and R. Gutiérrez, eds. 1997. Pintura, Escultura y Fotografía en Iberoamérica. Siglos XIX y XX . Madrid: Cátedra. pp. 247–258. Mariátegui, J. C., 1928. Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana. Lima: Amauta. Matto de Turner, C., 1889. Aves sin nido [Birds Without a Nest]. Lima: Imprenta del Universo de Carlos Prince. Méndez, C., 2011. De indio a serrano: nociones de raza y geografía en el Perú (siglos XVIII–XXI). Histórica, 35(1), pp. 53–102. Mendoza, Z., 2008. Creating Our Own: Folklore, Performance, and Identity in Cuzco, Peru. Durham: Duke University Press. Morong Reyes, G., 2014. El indio melancólico y temeroso: representaciones de alteridad en dos textos de Indias, Perú colonial siglos XVI–XVII. Diálogo andino, 45, pp. 27–38. Pagán-Teitelbaum, I., 2008. El glamour en los Andes: la representación de la mujer indígena migrante en el cine peruano. Revista Chilena de Antropología Visual, 12(1), pp. 1–30. Retablo, 2018. [film] Directed by Álvaro Delgado-Aparicio. Peru, Germany and Norway: Siri producciones. Romero, E. K., 2012. Hamaca Paraguaya (2006): Temporal Resistance and Its Impossibility. Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, 16, pp. 311–330. Rowe W., and Schelling, V., 1994. Memory and Modernity: Popular Culture in Latin America. London: Verso. Schoonover, K., 2012. Wastrels of Time: Slow Cinema’s Labouring Body, the Political Spectator, and the Queer. The Journal of Cinema and Media, 53(1), pp. 65–78. Valdivia, M. P., 2006. Cosmovisión aymara y su aplicación práctica en un contexto sanitario del norte de Chile. Revista de Bioética y Derecho [online] 7. Available at: [Accessed 20 June 2019]. Vich, C., 2014. De estetizaciones y viejos exotismos: apuntes en torno a La Teta Asustada de Claudia Llosa. Revista de crítica literaria latinoamericana, 80, pp. 333–344. Vivier, J., 2015. Una mirada “auténtica”: el “indígena” cuzqueño en la producción fotográfica de Martín Chambi, la película Kukuli y la publicidad turística. MA. University of Montreal. Wiñaypacha, 2017. [film] Directed by Óscar Catacora. Peru: Cine Aymara Studios and Ministerio de cultura del Perú.

CHAPTER 9

The Promise of Authenticity: Doing and Undoing the Cinematic Tourist Gaze in Claudia Llosa’s Short Films Daniella Wurst

Claudia Llosa and the Paradox of National Cinema Claudia Llosa has played a crucial role in the ongoing debate in Peru around the heightened visibility and growth of national cinema.1 Her first two feature films Madeinusa (2006) and La teta asustada [The Milk of Sorrow] (2009) had broad circulation and obtained critical attention both locally and internationally. In 2009, La teta asustada won the prestigious Golden Bear Award at the Berlin International Film Festival and was the first Peruvian film nominated in the Foreign Language Film Category at the Academy Awards in 2010, making Llosa a household name nationally and a renowned filmmaker of world cinema. Despite this attention, Llosa has been criticized locally for her portrayal of Andean culture as one that could be read as reproducing the projections of outside viewers, thus essentializing or exoticizing local cultures.

D. Wurst (B) Independent scholar, Lima, Peru © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 C. Vich and S. Barrow (eds.), Peruvian Cinema of the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52512-5_9

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Indeed, her first two features have been widely discussed, with polarizing perspectives that have produced fertile ground for debates about the national imaginary, its cultural realities, traditions, and tensions. This is central to the very (and ever changing) notion of national cinema as something that “emerges precisely when it intensely scrutinizes the idea of the national and refuses any facile equation of the national with a particular group of people, geographical location, or cultural traditions, for the purpose of creating an imaginary of national homogeneity” (Yoshimoto 2006, p. 259). This chapter will discuss two shorts made by Llosa in the immediate aftermath of the success of her first two features: El niño Pepita (2010), which was commissioned by the Museo de Barcelona for the exhibition El d_efecto barroco, and the campaign film Recordarás Perú (2012),2 which was made for the Department of Tourism and Commerce (Ministerio de Comercio y Turismo (MINCETUR)) for their national branding initiative Marca Perú. Both the short film and the campaign short might be considered minor works in the whole of Llosa’s oeuvre. In fact, neither have been discussed in relation to her role and contribution as a national filmmaker. However, both works are critical insofar as they touch upon Llosa’s own positionality within/outside national cinema at a moment when it becomes increasingly difficult to “examine critically the specificity of the national in/of films against the overwhelming force of transnational capital” (Yoshimoto 2006, p. 259). Taking into account the dialectical tension between Western representations and national cinema, and considering the strong link between cinema and audiovisual campaigns—especially those that include films that explicitly target the tourist industry—I present here, in a book about national cinema, an analysis of a film included in an advertising campaign. This is because national cinema not only offers discourses about the national imaginary, but produces images of the national that become commodities in contemporary neoliberal times. In discussing both of these minor works, I want to reflect on Llosa’s role as an internationally acclaimed auteur, as a mediator of images, and as an artist who has contributed to a marketization of the national both locally and globally. Therefore, it is important to think about the target audience and the reception of both productions. Here, the figure of the tourist and the notion of a (cinematic) tourist gaze is crucial. According to Ellen Strain, the tourist gaze is a perspective constructed by way of an oscillating series of objectifying strategies: reduction to surface spectacle; mystification, assimilation to Western structures of aesthetics

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and narratives, essentialization, synecdoche consumption, accumulation, and representation (Strain 2003, p. 18). In focusing on these seemingly minor works, this chapter will consider how both address the dynamic negotiation of national cinema within international market demands in contrasting and varied ways: reaffirming, addressing, or undoing the tourist gaze proposed by Strain and furthered developed as a cinematic tactic by Rodanthi Tzanelli (2007, pp. 3–6). Llosa’s trajectory and her navigation of the polarizing demands between the national and the international cinema realm is showcased in the aesthetic choices present in her film narratives.3 Even though her films have been criticized locally for their portrayal of the Andean world, it is the same use of indigenous cultures and inclusion of a mystical Andean cosmovision what makes her films appealing to the gaze of the cinematic tourist abroad, as it guides their discovery of Andean culture (Monette 2016, p. 532). This is precisely what has been locally criticized; specifically, that in an effort to cater to external demands, there is a tendency to essentialize or exoticize the Andean world, reinforcing the cultural antagonisms and distance between the urban coastal capital and Andean rural culture. Llosa’s first two films and the discussions surrounding them exemplify a particular dynamic in consumption of third world films by Western cultures (Strain 2003; Tzanelli 2007): the promise that through filmic journeys, the act of seeing and knowing offered by the films has the potential to entice the foreign cinematic tourist to experience the unknown world as both authentic and fascinating. El niño Pepita and Recordarás Perú negotiate the cinematic tourist gaze in contrasting ways, either by addressing and deconstructing it (El niño…) or by explicitly reaffirming it (Recordarás…). El niño… adopts the mockumentary4 format to allow for a self-reflexive commentary about the process of filmmaking itself as well as of its representations of images of the nation abroad. The fictional narrative about the arrival of a new saint to a community at the outskirts of the capital produces an ironic depiction of the marketization of the sacred. Unintentionally, the short film foreshadows the deep-rooted fusion between neoliberal logic and nationalism that became prevalent in mainstream Peruvian media (thanks to official campaigns such as Marca Perú) in the years immediately following its production. On the other hand, Recordarás… sheds the ironic commentary and explicitly caters to the demands of the cinematic tourist gaze and the promise of authenticity it can offer. More importantly, this film illustrates the way in which neoliberal imperatives, national

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branding, and global market influences have shifted the way we engage with the national imaginary as citizens, and how the image of the national is projected locally and abroad. Both El niño… and Recordarás… invest in the idea of authenticity in very different ways. The use of the mockumentary genre in El niño… exposes the ideological demands of the viewer and of the documentary gaze itself. The low-budget aesthetic of the short, as well as the inclusion of crucial moments of tension that question the intentions of the film-making crew and the supposed veracity of the saint, opens a prime space for the spectator to reflect on the tensions that arise locally in the production of images of the national. In Recordarás… the promise of experiential authenticity is addressed explicitly within the logics of the promotional video narrative structure and the objectives of Marca Perú. This promise is the end-goal of the campaign film, as it is ultimately what is being offered as a commodity to the tourist-spectator. Though both projects differ greatly in style and target audience, both elucidate the relationship that Peruvian filmmaking develops with or against different kinds of markets. The choice in making them illustrates a compromise that is not unfamiliar for national directors in search of financing—to accept a project commissioned by the state with a large budget and a lucrative profit allows the filmmaker to continue working on their craft—even if it implies submitting their artistic view to fit the vision and demands of the national branding initiative and to the tourist market. Even with more experimental and artistic projects like El niño…, Llosa still needs to cater to the expectations of an intellectual, artistic, high-brow international market. In what follows, I will show how these two projects illustrate the director’s ability to navigate different markets in her positioning both as an auteur of world cinema and as a mediator of images in the marketization of the national.

˜ Pepita The Promise of Authenticity in El Nino The ten-minute short El niño…,5 commissioned for the Spanish exhibition El d_fecto barroco, políticas de la imagen hispana, ran from November 9, 2010 to February 27, 2011. The exhibition was financed by the Centro de Cultura Contemporánea de Barcelona (CCCB) and developed in collaboration with the Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional para el Desarrollo (AECID), the Sociedad Estatal para la Acción Cultural Exterior (SEACEX), and the Entitat Autonoma de Difusió Cultural of the

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Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona i Diputació de Barcelona (CCCB). Curated by Jorge Luis Marzo and Tere Badia, El d_fecto barroco examined the long-lasting influence of the baroque in building and legitimizing the identity and memory of Latin American nations. The exhibit was mostly composed of audiovisual materials (video installations, film stills and fragments, short films, interviews) that reflected on the myth of the baroque and the way in which art has the potential to contribute to re-signify and deconstruct the deeply seated influence of the baroque in popular cultures, creating a common space and identity (Marzo and Badia 2010). The short film distances itself stylistically from Llosa’s previous features—showcasing a departure from a more polished and artsy aesthetic to a much grainier and almost home-made video quality, and distancing itself from a distinctly linear narrative with any kind of resolution. The concept and script created and directed by Llosa captures the fictional arrival of a new saint to a community in an unnamed district located at the outskirts of Lima.6 The mockumentary adopts the traditional observational and non-interventionist mode of the documentary genre, following a preacher (the actor Ramón García) who announces the advent of el niño Pepita to the neighborhood. The short is interspersed with staged interviews with actors that interpret members of the community, offering testimonies that attest to the effectiveness of the devotion of the saint via the acquisition of the products offered in the online platforms of El niño… Framing the short are close-ups of the statue of el niño Pepita as it hovers around the territory. A short supplementary video included in the YouTube page entitled Niño Pepita flotando depicts the statue of the saint sitting in his inflatable altar, drifting above the land and finally ascending to the sky and out of the frame in a surrealist take. The curatorial text that accompanies the short describes the image and figure of el niño Pepita as both “a saint” and “an expert in viral marketing, who for some time has been sharing his creed through the Internet and offering products to consolidate its devotion” (Llosa 2010, p. 87).7 In this same text, Llosa casts a shadow of doubt and ambiguity first around the figure of the saint, rhetorically asking “Is el niño Pepita an impostor? A result of a sacrilegious mind that just pretends to profit?”; then of its followers: “Is the mass so credulous that it will have faith in anyone and anything to calm their desires and frustrations? Is the saint as miraculous as his followers say?”; and finally -and most importantly- of the cinematic gaze of the short: -“Is this a manipulated and unscrupulous video that

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pretends to impersonate the innocent and homemade vision of a tourist fascinated by the image he has discovered?”8 These questions anticipate the potential of the mockumentary and its primary purpose to exploit and help construct a new set of relationships between the audience and the approach of factual discourse and images in order to move toward a potential position of critical awareness both to offer a commentary on aspects of contemporary culture and to comment pointedly on the nature of the documentary itself and its consumption (Roscoe and Hight 2001, p. 46). Most importantly, in blurring the lines between fact and fiction, the mockumentary El niño… not only draws attention to the form of the documentary genre but also to its ideological discourse. The image of el niño Pepita is described by the director as “a hybrid between ornate baroque and redefined modernity” (Llosa 2010, p. 88), distancing itself from the popular saints that are more common in Peru. In contrast with San Martin de Porres or Sarita Colonia,9 for example, the blond hair and blue eyes of el niño Pepita are closer to a cherubic European-style religious iconography, signaling a conscious displacement from the focus on a strongly rooted Andean culture in Llosa’s previous films, to an ahistorical and generic saint figure. Thus, the magical and mystical elements are not inherent to the local culture, but in a reverse move, they seem to be artificially imposed and imported, caricatured in a way that emphasizes its artificiality. However, in this film there is an evocation of the national in the way the saint is constructed. The use of saturated and highly contrasted colors in his inflatable altar, in the portraits of him imprinted on the sheets and on the containers of the vitamin supplements evokes a pop postmodern kitsch style that also simultaneously references a recognizable national popular “chichi” cultural aesthetic.10 The exaggerated irreverence of this figure and its surrounding objects should be read and appreciated in an ironic way. The over-the-top artificiality surrounding the image of el niño Pepita, together with the absence of a historical background origin story, undermines the potential verisimilitude of the short film’s narrative—the belief that el niño Pepita could in fact be a real saint worthy of devotion. The stand-alone interviews given by the actors reenact the style of an infomercial rather than of a documentary testimony. The interventions of the preacher (whose performance resembles more that of a traveling salesman than a religious leader) also contribute to the ironic hybridity of the short.11 The excessive superficiality of the staged interviews12

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showcases a shallow spirituality, serving as a commentary on the commodification of the sacred through blind consumerism since the promise of happiness is solely accessed through the purchase of related products: the inflatable altar, the vitamins, the bed sheets.13 On the surface, the parodic potential of the short seems to lie in the erosion of the sacred through cheap consumerism, but it also extends beyond this. The use of parody in the mockumentary can be interpreted as a meta-commentary of the filmic format it adopts and captures, the blind faith deposited not only in fictional religious icons, but in images in general, and more specifically in what is expected of images of the developing world. By foregrounding the constructed nature of representation and of the image, parodic documentaries may also underscore the underlying myths and ideological discourses of the form—both its construction and consumption.14 In that sense, the documentary project itself is its true subject (Roscoe and Hight 2001). It is key to note that what is being mocked in the short is not the belief or devotion of the community, as these are foreign and artificially constructed by the El niño… documentary itself. Instead, what is parodied is the nature of the documentary and the supposed unmediated reflection of reality in the image it constructs. By making obvious its fictionality, the short invites the viewer to reflect on the constructed nature of representation of the documentary and the image it creates. Furthermore, it invites a reflection on the demands of certain images of the developing world for the international film festival spectator. By compelling the viewer to question the supposed authority and veracity of the film, El niño… reveals less about its object and more about the filmmaker’s intentions as she responds to the desires of the spectators and the expectations deposited in her filmmaking. By transforming what the spectators want to see (the local customs and belief systems) to an imposed and constructed icon in its most overcharged baroque and artificial dimensions, Llosa reflects on the consumption of an exotic and magical third world image; one that promises authenticity and fascination to the touristic outsider gaze that both captures and consumes this image. The obvious artificiality of the saint as it floats over the community and rapidly travels out of frame evokes the magical realism imagery present in very popular Latin American literature consumed avidly by foreigners (Fig. 9.1).15 By foregrounding the absurdity of the premise framed within a supposed objective form, Llosa reveals its artificiality and the way it represents a fantasy of what a specific audience wants to see in the depiction of

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Fig. 9.1 Video still Niño Pepita flotando (Llosa 2010)

the other. This implies a double irony: the knowing gaze of the satirical parody and a disavowal of the supposed objective authority of the filmed image with its claim to truth. Essential to this, as with any mockumentary, is a moment of disruption or tension that suspends the smooth unfolding of the [fictional] narrative. This allows for a reflection on the intentionality of the gaze, turning the camera inward into the process itself. The most important part of the ten-minute short is precisely one action by a member of the community billed as an extra. Immediately after the preacher’s proclaiming of the virtues of the saint, an off-screen voice behind the camera asks a man how el niño Pepita has impacted his life. He is repeatedly asked whether he believes in the saint and whether “it is real or not.” Even after asserting multiple times that he does not believe in el niño Pepita, the off-screen voice insists. The film captures a palpable irritation in the interviewed subject, an exasperation at the insistent questioning or perhaps an annoyance at the assumption that the community is gullible enough

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to believe in a non-existent and clearly artificial saint. When asked how [the man] was before meeting el niño Pepita, he answers “I have not met him so far. I don’t want to meet him because I know it doesn’t exist […] I am very sure, and I thank God that at this moment he has not yet convinced me of el niño Pepita.” When asked once again for his reasons, the man answers “Because it doesn’t exist, it’s the truth. El niño Pepita is not a truth […] I am sure of this as sure as I am of my own name” (2010). In contrast with the set-up interviews that resemble testimonials in infomercials, this exchange lacks a staged quality. The man is stopped in his tracks by the camera operator and the off-screen voice, and the framing of the exchange is a close-up shot of the interviewed subject’s face which projects a sense of invasiveness, not only of the man’s personal space and time, but also of the community by the takeover of the film project. By refusing to acknowledge the presence or veracity of the saint, the subject demonstrates an unscripted resistance, a refusal to play along and be part of this [fictional] narrative. This moment is tense mainly in that it captures a breach in the ethical pact between the filmmaker and the filmed subject and the supposed non-interventionist and objective stance documentary filmmakers must have toward their subjects. Thus, it emphasizes the camera as an outsider to and an imposition on the community. The irritation of the interviewed subject seems to be directed not only at the obvious artificiality of the saint, but also at the possibility that his own image could be used as a prop to play a scripted blind devotion. The mentioning of God in his response seems to hint at an almost sacrilegious offense present in the filming narrative, one that the subject does not want to be a part of. It is ironic that the most authentic part of the documentary is precisely one in which the narrative of the genre itself is being questioned. I contend that it is not gratuitous that this obvious moment of tension was retained in the short. By deliberately including this uneasy exchange, Llosa seems to be alluding to the resistance or local criticisms she herself has experienced as a filmmaker, considered as an “outsider” who goes to film a community and creates a narrative out of traditions and beliefs that are not her own. It also echoes a reservation from the part of filmed subjects, a fear that they might feel misrepresented by an imposed and constructed narrative of their beliefs and ways of living. The fact that the interviewed subject is not part of the cast of actors,16 but rather one of the residents billed as an extra, is an important distinction because it implies that the exchange captured is not necessarily scripted. The ambiguity as to

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whether he is prompted to react this way or whether this is a genuine reaction allows for a space of unsettlement and reflection for the viewer. This moment is deliberately uncomfortable—just as the mockumentary format as a whole is designed to cause discomfort for the spectator—because as viewers we cannot be sure who is in on the joke or what exactly is being mocked. The effectiveness of parody within a mockumentary depends on a knowing audience that is familiar with the codes and conventions of the documentary and is ready to accept its comedic treatment (Roscoe and Hight 2001; Juhazs and Lerner 2006), but also on the discourse that takes it seriously or at face value. In order for the mockumentary to work, it needs both a knowing and an unknowing audience to reinforce its pragmatic ethos and its double structure (Juhazs and Lerner 2006, p. 9). The knowing-wink inherent in parody engages with an audience that lets them know they are “in on the joke.” In El niño… the audience that is “in on the joke” is not a local one, but a European high-brow museum elite, an audience similar to that intellectual festival spectator who finds pleasure in figuring out the targeted references present in films. El niño… evidences a stark division in terms of its target foreign audience and its national reception. Besides a few articles announcing Llosa’s participation in the exhibit, El niño… did not garner much national or critical attention,17 or produce any local discussion or debate. The few comments on the YouTube video platform and in el niño Pepita’s Facebook page seem to align with that of the skeptical interviewed subject included in the short. Most local comments are offended by the banality of faith it reproduces and describe the absurdity of the short as blasphemous, conveying a concern that the fictional might, indeed, be conflated as the real beliefs or traditions of the local population. Ultimately, though they may seem distant, these two faiths—the devotion to the saint and to the “mystical third world image” created for the foreign spectator- are closer than they appear; both are part of a projected fantasy sustained by the consumerist discourse of these contemporary times.

´ Peru´ The Promise of Authenticity in Recordaras The ironic or self-reflexive commentary of El niño… is completely absent in the campaign film Recordarás Perú, filmed two years after the short, at the height of the success of the Marca Perú campaign. In fact, the international spot explicitly reproduces the ideological discourse that crafts

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an image of the national as what is desired by a tourist gaze that both celebrates and domesticates “the other” (Urry 1990). One of the most important parts of the Marca Perú initiative was its calling for citizens to become cultural ambassadors of the national brand. This was an imperative for Peruvians to assert their citizenship through becoming participatory subjects, proudly representing the value of the nation. The campaign also counted on official cultural ambassadors— noted Peruvian artists, athletes, chefs, and entertainers who not only represented this, but who were in themselves valuable examples of pride and success. It seems only logical then that after the critical success and international recognition of her first two feature films, Llosa would not only join the ranks as an official cultural ambassador but also be asked to direct the third and final installment of the Marca Perú campaign video, one explicitly directed at an international audience. Recordarás… portrays the appeal of the national as something that can be offered, consumed, and enjoyed by a foreign subject. Peru becomes the platform and the backdrop that will provide those abroad with the experiential promise embedded in the tourist experience. The video reaffirms the cinematic tourist gaze and the vision of the national imaginary as constructed solely through it. Thus, it unapologetically redefines the vision of peruanidad as one prompted by what it can offer to those outside of it. Recordarás… begins with a black screen with the year 2032 written in bold white letters, then opening into a futuristic office completely devoid of anything that would anchor it to a specific place. The cold colors of the setting give the sense of a sterile and non-descript environment. In the opening sequence, a middle-aged businessman, looking stressed and busy, sits at his desk. He is interrupted by his secretary, who announces he has a message “From you, twenty years ago” and hands him a wooden box—a typical artisanal object that stands in anachronistic contrast to the sleek futuristic design of the environment. The businessman opens the box and takes out of it a portable USB stick. He places the USB stick on the surface of his desk and its content projects onto a screen in front of him, showing a video of his younger self, during a trip to Peru, with Machu Picchu as the background, the quintessential postcard image of the country and the main tourist interest of Peru abroad. As the younger man addresses the older self, the viewer’s gaze aligns with that of the businessman; together they become the spectators of the content projected in front of him, privy to the flashback of the subject’s personal memories

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during his trip to Peru. Images of vast and expansive landscapes and idyllic moments of leisure and communal sharing are intertwined with personal moments of self reflection—the younger businessman staring into the distance in the desert, as a sentimental song plays in the background. The short ends with the businessman calling his wife, who answers the phone with a tone of disdain and asks him if he is coming home late again. We see a close-up of the businessman smiling as he asks his wife “Have you ever been to Peru?” The spot ends with the nation brand logo and an off-screen voice that states the slogan of the campaign: “Whatever you need, you can find today in Peru.” The narrative operates under a retro-futuristic paradigm; during a dystopic future that lacks vitality, the promise of a better experience is offered through a nostalgic longing for an idealized past (Gomero Correo 2019, p. 132). The video works as a bildungsroman in reverse by delving backward into the past, the subject can reconnect with what he has lost through the demands of modern day life and recuperate the wisdom of his younger, freer self. In Recordarás…, Peru is portrayed as an escape from a homogenizing modernity. By revisiting the flashbacks that showcase the immersion into nature and community,18 the short configures Peru as the platform that will enable a spiritual, emotional, interpersonal reencounter, providing the protagonist but also the foreign viewer with whatever he needs or whatever has been missing while he has been busy catering to the demands of the modern world. By contrast with the ludic, low-budget aesthetic of El niño…, the richly produced nation-branding short undoes any kind of critical or ironic commentary on the construction of a national image. Given that the video was financed entirely by the state, it caters explicitly to an uncomplicated, luring, image of Peru to the outsider, its value as to what it can promise in terms of experience for the target international tourist viewer. The series of wide-shots of natural landscapes create an aestheticized spatiality (Harvey 1998, p. 337), the necessary backdrop to produce a moment of reflection that leads the spectators to appreciate the beauty of the world, but also to confront their smallness within it, a potentially humbling experience. Different experiential memories rapidly follow, representing the fleeting nature of memory. The inclusion of scenes of communal living is important insofar as they convey a utopian unboundedness, a sense of an existential or spontaneous communitas, a transient personal experience of togetherness where the structures and differences arising out of institutional socioeconomic and

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sociopolitical positions, status, and roles disappear (Turner 1974, p. 47 in Wang 1999, p. 364). As the memories of the businessman unfold, we hear the off-screen voice of his younger self, reminding him of a simpler time, one that was not ruled by status, cultural capital, or the constructed social hierarchies that organize modern life and produce a sense of alienation with the self. The promise of authenticity of the campaign is deposited at the level of the experiential19 for the businessman but also for the targeted international viewer. Thus, the commodity that the campaign film offers is not a specific image or product to be consumed, but rather a truly valuable experience. Peru is portrayed as a promise of the (literal) projections of the cinematic tourist; specifically, the promise of existential authenticity. This quest connotes a search for a traditional culture that provides a sense of the genuine or the unique. But more importantly, the search for authenticity partakes in the project of emotional transformation of the self, addressing “a preoccupation with an existential state of being” (Wang 1999, p. 355 in Tzanelli 2007, p. 30). Hence, the promise inherent in travel experience is less an encounter with the other and more one in which the traveling subject re-encounters the self one has lost. The promise of authenticity is primarily a search for and between oneself (Wang 1999, p. 364) (Fig. 9.2).

Fig. 9.2 Businessman encounters his (younger) self in the year 2032 in Recordarás Perú (Llosa 2012)

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The promotional short uses advertising and marketing tools to play on predictable emotional registers20 for example, the strategic use of music playing in crescendo and in sync with the idyllic flashbacks that lead the businessman to the epiphany of traveling back to Peru to recuperate what he has lost. Llosa creates a visual display of the national territory as the platform that can facilitate the encounter of the (alienated and lost) self with the previous, more humanized identity. The marketization of authenticity is also extremely strategic, as this quest, like her films, operates with tropes that are both relatable and universal: the longing for connection and the depiction of the traveling journey also as a journey of self-discovery. In contrast with the first two Marca Perú campaign films21 Llosa’s third installment erases the national subject from the narrative. Therefore, the sense of pride inherent in the national campaign no longer needs a Peruvian mediator; neither does it lie in what the nation can offer its own citizens. Instead, national pride is deposited in what it can offer to others: “Whatever you need is found today in Peru.” Nevertheless, Recordarás… had an extremely warm and successful local reception and circulation, in addition to being critically praised abroad. As with the preceding Marca Perú campaign films, Recordarás… went viral, widely shared on social media platforms both locally and internationally. The comments in the YouTube video attest to its success: international subjects reminisce about their trip to Peru, and proud national subjects boast about their nation’s assets. For the national subject, pride is experienced by proxy, as Llosa constructs a narrative that allocates the sentiment of pride as one that is validated by watching their nation through the eyes and experiences of others. Ultimately, the campaign film achieved its intended purpose and, like Llosa’s fictional works, was critically praised and internationally recognized.22 Though the participatory national subject is absent from the visual representation, the narrative finds a way to implicitly address the national subject through the temporal re-orderings present in the narrative. Set in 2032, the twenty-year flashback strategically syncs the “idealized past” to the present tense of the publication of the film (the year 2012). This allows the national viewer to recognize what the nation presently offers and thus also allows him/her to re-discover the value of one’s own nation, even as it is presented as what it can offer to the global market. In the film, Llosa provides the protagonist, the international target audience and the local spectator, with a narrative of self-discovery.

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Conclusion By focusing on these two pieces, I hope to have presented an original engagement with Claudia Llosa’s work and the place she occupies as a producer of images about Peru. As distant as they may seem to be in tone, format, and target audience, Recordarás… and El niño… dialogue with one another in interesting ways. The depiction of the commodification of the sacred in El niño… aligns with the redress of the nation as a brand that would transform the idea of Peruvian identity in the following years. Instead of selling products that confirm miracles, belief, or devotion, Marca Perú turns potential experiences into the desired commodity— thus creating a new faith in the promise of a national imaginary as seen through the gaze of (the targeted consumer) others. Ultimately, the potential of analyzing both minor works such as these lies in seeing how they reveal less about the projected beliefs or traditions of Peru, and more about the present realities and negotiations of the image of the nation within a global market. At their core, both the campaign and the short film orbit around the idea of belief and investment in what the cinematic image can offer its (specific) audiences. They allow us to reflect on new forms of engagement with the national, and in the projected fantasies and contemporary global fascination with the image of the nation abroad, not only as something that can be consumed but also as a platform of knowledge or self-discovery. Llosa’s capacity to navigate a high-brow museum circuit abroad and a national mainstream marketing campaign targeted for the international viewer positions her as a world cinema auteur, as a national director, and as the type of cultural ambassador presented in the nationbranding project. This is not necessarily contradictory, but rather reaffirms her fundamental role as a mediator of images of the national. Ultimately, the blind devotion to the fictional saint in El niño… is not unlike the faith deposited in the promise of what Peru can offer to the international viewer. Instead of imagining the nation in terms of heroic narratives or shared common values, both shorts attest to a new faith created on the promise of consumption. In one, it is through the image and branded products of a fictional saint, and in the other, it is in the promise of Peru as the platform through which to host experiences in the quest for authenticity and self-discovery; turning experience itself into the main commodity. Finally, both projects elucidate the inherent paradox of national cinema revealing not only what images claim they can say about the national imaginary, but also about the projected fantasies held from both local and outsider gazes.

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Notes 1. See Barrow (2013, p. 212). 2. From now on, the short El niño Pepita will be abbreviated to El niño… and the international campaign film Recordarás Perú will be abbreviated to Recordarás…. 3. For example, in the funding, circulation, and production of her films as well as in her interactions and negotiations with the local communities where she films. 4. Mock-documentary, later called mockumentary (Lebow 2006) is a subgenre that blurs the lines between reality and fiction. It adopts the codes and conventions of the documentary in order to make a commentary on aspects of contemporary culture, or to comment more pointedly on the nature of the documentary itself and its claims of truth (Roscoe and Hight 2001; Juhazs and Lerner 2006). 5. The short also had a series of paratextual works accompanying the video, including a fictional Facebook and YouTube page with twelve shorter complementary videos. 6. The video showcases the hills known as the “Conos” that border Lima. This area is mostly composed of migrants from the interior of the country. These places are no longer considered marginal, but are inhabited by an emergent middle class that has an active role in both production and consumption of goods. 7. The following quote from Claudia Llosa appears on the curatorial text of the exhibition edited by Jorge Luis Marzo and Teresa Badia, 2010. El d_efecto barroco: políticas de la imagen hispana. Centro de Cultura Contemporánea de Barcelona, Barcelona, pp. 87–88. 8. All the English translations from Spanish are mine. 9. These two have been icons of devotion, especially as their origin story provided a figure of identification for the struggles of the marginal subject within the national imaginary. 10. “Chicha culture” is a hybrid of traditional and modern influences present in cultural manifestations projected through urbanization projects that appeal to a mainstream popular mass, and are disseminated throughout the national territory (Huerta 2004, p. 135). 11. This is made explicit in one of the interviews where the number to buy the products advertised flashes on the screen. 12. In one of them, a middle-aged woman (Delcy Heredia) sits on a couch next to her inflatable altar and boasts about all the benefits of her devotion to the saint. 13. When accompanied by faith and devotion, each of these objects gives way to a hetero-normative access to the promise of happiness: The inflatable altar makes the woman lose weight, the vitamins make the weak child stronger and athletic, and the sheets save a marriage in crisis.

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14. Jameson (1984; in Rose 1993) notes that the actual intent of parody is the generation of critical commentary. Yet parody can both reinforce and be critical of its subject matter, turning into both object and subject of its criticism and sit alongside it. 15. One very relevant example of this is the image of Remedios, La Bella ascending the sky in One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Marquez (1967). 16. The actors that appear in the credits of the short as the “cast” are the preacher and the interviewed subjects that advertise the different niño Pepita products: the husband and wife, the mother, and the older woman who purchases the niño Pepita altar. 17. Even though it was distributed for free through YouTube, the short merely has only accumulated 10,000 views since its release nine years ago) and has been featured only in a few blurbs in online blogs and in small press notices in local newspapers. 18. For example, harmonic interactions with local citizens and different kinds of “learning” experiences. 19. The promise of an authentic experience is a common trope used in advertisement and tourist campaigns in general. The emphasis on offering experiences charged with unique emotions and sensations finds a perfect platform in nation brands (Lossio 2019, p. 74). In the Marca Perú campaign, the nation is promoted as a place that offers an emotional experience that will secure an affective bond with its consumers, whether they are citizens, tourists, or investors. 20. Such as a longing for an idealized past, humbling experiences of learning, idyllic communitas conveyed in scenes of laughter, joy, dance and music, and moments of introspection for the subject immersed in a vast and majestic nature. 21. In the first two, the national subjects turn into cultural ambassadors who mediate the experience of belonging to the nation for the foreign American (Peru, Nebraska) and European (Loreto) other. 22. Recordarás Perú won the prize in the international category in the Spanish Territory & Marketing Awards, 2003. When accepting the award, the General Secretary of PromPerú noted “We entrusted Claudia Llosa with a great challenge: to captivate the audience in just three minutes. We believe she achieved it.” .

Works Cited Barrow, S., 2013. New Configurations for Peruvian Cinema: The Rising Star of Claudia Llosa. Transnational Cinemas, 4(2), pp. 197–215.

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Cánepa Koch, G. and Lossio, F., 2019. La marca país como campo argumentativo y los desafíos de problematizar el Perú como marca. In: G. Cánepa Koch and F. Lossio Chávez, eds. 2019. La Nación celebrada: marca país y ciudadanías en disputa. Lima: Fondo Editorial Universidad del Pacífico. pp. 9–40. Gomero Correa, G., 2019. ¿Qué fue la Marca Perú? Subjetividades temporales y nation branding. In G. Cánepa Koch and F. Lossio Chávez, eds. 2019. La Nación celebrada: marca país y ciudadanías en disputa. Lima: Fondo Editorial Universidad del Pacífico. pp. 121–141. Juhasz, A., 2006. Introduction: Phony Definitions. In: A. Juhasz and J. Lerner, eds. 2006. F Is for Phony: Fake Documentaries and Truth’s Undoing. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. pp. 1–18. Harvey, D., 1998. La condición posmoderna. Investigaciones sobre los orígenes del cambio cultural. Buenos Aires: Amorrortu. Huerta, A., 2004. Ciudad abierta: lo popular en la ciudad peruana. Perú Hoy. Las Ciudades en el Perú, 4, pp. 129–154. La teta asustada [The Milk of Sorrow], 2009. [film] Directed by Claudia Llosa. Peru-Spain: Generalitat de Catalunya - Institut Català de les Indústries Culturals (ICIC), Ministerio de cultura, Oberón cinematográfica, Televisió de Catalunya (TV3), Televisión española (TVE), Vela producciones, and Wanda visión S.A. Lebow, A., 2006. Faking What? Making a Mockery of Documentary. In: A. Juhasz and J. Lerner, eds. 2006. F Is for Phony: Fake Documentaries and Truth’s Undoing. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. pp. 223– 237. Llosa, C., 2010. El niño Pepita [video online] Available at: [Accessed 20 October 2019]. Llosa, C., 2010. El Niño Pepita. In J. L. Marzo and T. Badia, eds. 2010. El d_efecto barroco: políticas de la imagen hispana. Barcelona: Centro de Cultura Contemporánea de Barcelona. pp. 87–88. Llosa, C., 2010. Niño Pepita flotando [video online] Available at: [Accessed 20 October 2019]. Llosa, C., 2012. Recordarás Perú: Marca Perú: Campaña de lanzamiento internacional 2012 [video online] Available at: [Accessed 20 October 2019]. Lossio, F., 2019. La nación en tiempos especulativos o los imperativos culturales de las marcas país. In: G. Cánepa Koch and F. Lossio Chávez, eds. 2019. La nación celebrada. Marca país y ciudadanías en disputa. Lima: Fondo Editorial Universidad del Pacífico. pp. 67–99. Madeinusa, 2006. [film] Directed by Claudia Llosa. Peru and Spain: Oberán cinematográfica, Vela producciones, Wanda visión.

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Marzo, J. and Badia, T., 2010. El d_efecto barroco: políticas de la imagen hispana: guía de interpretación. Barcelona: Centre de Cultura Contemporánea de Barcelona. Monette, M., 2016. Cinematic Tourism in Madeinusa. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 93(5), pp. 531–547. Roscoe, J. and Hight, C., 2001. Faking It: Mock-Documentary and the Subversion of Factuality. Manchester: University of Manchester Press. Rose, M., 1993. Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Post-Modern. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. RPP Noticias, 2013. Campaña de Marca Perú Gana Premio en España. RPP Noticias [online] 21 June. Available at: https://rpp.pe/lima/actualidad/ campana-de-marca-peru-gana-premio-en-espana-noticia-606266 [Accessed 10 December 2019]. Strain, E., 2003. Public Places, Private Journeys: Ethnography, Entertainment, and the Tourist Gaze. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Turner, V., 1974. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Tzanelli, R., 2007. The Cinematic Tourist: Explorations in Globalization, Culture, and Resistance. London: Routledge. Urry, J., 1990. The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Society. London: Sage. Wang, N., 1999. Rethinking Authenticity in Tourist Experience. Annals of Tourism Research, 26(2), pp. 349–370. Yoshimoto, M., 2006. National/International/Transnational: The Concept of Trans-Asian Cinema and the Cultural Politics of Film Criticism. In: V. Vitali and P. Willemen, eds. 2006. Theorizing National Cinema. London: BFI Publishing. pp. 254–261.

CHAPTER 10

Local Grounding, Transnational Reach: The Films of Héctor Gálvez María Helena Rueda

Introduction Spaces and objects are imbued with agency in the films of Héctor Gálvez. An arid ochre enclave confronts the youngsters of Paraíso [Paradise] (2009) with an uncertain future, while a gray governmental office hinders the work of forensic anthropologists in NN (2014). A small bottle of water supports a girl’s aspirations for a better life in the first film, while a recovered blue sweater provides relief to a grieving widow in the second. In Paraíso and NN —Gálvez’s only fiction features to date—such spaces and objects shape the characters’ lives, telling stories that we are invited to decode. Both films encourage viewers to reflect on the aftermath of the internal armed conflict that ravaged Peru in the 1980s and 1990s. Yet these films have also traveled widely outside the country. Gálvez belongs to a growing group of Peruvian filmmakers whose work has been successfully showcased on the international festival circuit, approaching topics that reach beyond a preoccupation with the national.1 Within this group,

M. H. Rueda (B) Smith College, Northampton, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 C. Vich and S. Barrow (eds.), Peruvian Cinema of the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52512-5_10

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Gálvez is particularly intent on grounding his films in a specifically Peruvian context, while still opening up a transnational perspective that widens their social reach. In what follows, I address how Gálvez speaks to both local and global concerns by focusing on the materiality of the experiences presented in his films. His stylistic and thematic choices invite viewers to notice such materiality. He lets particular spaces and objects linger in the frame, drawing attention to explicitly concrete aspects of the characters’ lives. Local audiences will establish connections to their own geography and history, while transnational ones will find links to other localities and experiences. Gálvez thus opens up his films to multiple appropriations, without depriving his stories of contextual meaning and weight. With regards to spaces, Gálvez avoids a kind of abstraction noted by Henri Lefebvre in cinematic images. For Lefebvre, who conceived of space as socially produced, the art of filmmaking “detaches the pure form from its impure content—from lived time, everyday time, and from bodies with their opacity and solidity” (1974, p. 97). Gálvez, we might say, invites viewers to “re-attach” abstract cinematic spaces to a solid reality. Such re-attachment works differently for different audiences, as each viewer draws from their own lived experience to make sense of the spaces projected onto the screen. As for objects, Gálvez endows them with an agency that establishes the concreteness of his characters’ worlds. In his films, stories are told in great part through images of things like water, boulders, clothes, bones, and photographs. We are invited to see the characters and the world they inhabit in the relational ways theorized by studies on the agency of matter (e.g., Coole and Frost 2010). The protagonists’ struggles are shown through images of a material world that determines their actions. While spaces and objects ground the stories in a material reality, it is worth noting that the director also relies on dialogues to bring into the narrative people and events that never appear on screen. The characters often talk about people who are dead or remain unidentified, and events that happened years ago and far away. Additionally, both Paraíso and NN include few obvious references to Peru and its recent history. Knowledge of that history will situate the stories in that context, but the events portrayed might have taken place in other post-conflict localities around the world. These films invite viewers from different backgrounds to reflect on some of the challenges faced by societies living with the aftermath of violence.

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Gálvez is, to be sure, neither the only nor the first Peruvian or Latin American cinema auteur to deploy these or similar strategies to give their work transnational reach. Gálvez’s films, however, manifest a unique interest in understanding how present-day struggles are connected to longstanding inequities that are seldom represented or discussed. His films invite spectators to link the challenges faced by his characters not only to the years of terror in Peru, but also to widespread patterns of structural violence. We could trace this interest back to his work as a videographer for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR in short, for Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación), established in 2001.2 This work led to Gálvez’s first full-length film, Lucanamarca (2008), a documentary he co-directed with Carlos Cárdenas. The film registers a visit by the CVR to the Andean town of Lucanamarca, site of the first major massacre perpetrated by the Shining Path. While more focalized than his later fiction films, Lucanamarca also draws attention to underlying forces—such as racially based marginalization—that become manifest in localized practices of violence. Lucanamarca combines interviews of the town’s inhabitants with images from the exhumation of those killed in the massacre. The film portrays a town where the past remains part of the present, not just because its people still mourn lost loved ones, but also because the town’s situation has not changed much since the massacre. We see that the largely peasant population is still as impoverished and marginalized as it was before. The film places its focus on the persistence of problems linked to the continuous abandonment of and discrimination against communities like this one by those in urban centers of power. While focused on persons and places located in the present, Lucanamarca brings back a painful past that is entangled with that present, inviting a reflection on the reasons for such continuity. While less explicitly localized than Lucanamarca, Paraíso and NN continued an exploration of the realities that Gálvez had observed in that first film. The relevance of Gálvez’s films, however, goes well beyond the Peruvian context. With their successful circulation in international festivals, they participate in a conversation that transcends national borders. While engaged in collective efforts within Peru to recover the memory of an armed conflict that deeply traumatized the national community, they touch upon problems pertinent to conflicts that affect many places around the world. Their visual and narrative styles also situate them in dialogue with other auteur films that are distributed under the much-debated

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category of “world cinema” (Nagib et al. 2012). In the next section, I discuss Gálvez’s films as cultural products intended to be socially relevant at both the national and transnational levels—an aspiration that often involves the negotiation of conflicting expectations.

National Films on a World Stage To understand the national character of Gálvez’s films, it helps to situate them in their local context of production. In her study on contemporary Peruvian cinema, Sarah Barrow (2018) discusses how films in the country since the late 1980s have portrayed the armed conflict as a national crisis. While preserving memories about the conflict, Barrow argues, such films have also helped address questions about race and poverty in Peru that emerged from that crisis. Gálvez is one of the directors mentioned by Barrow as successors to this tradition. In terms of production, his films were made within a model that, according to Barrow, started with the anti-protectionist reforms implemented by the government of Alberto Fujimori in the 1990s. She points out that filmmakers were then forced to compete for state, private, and international sources of financing, which incentivized the production of films with transnational appeal. Gálvez has made his films in this environment. His stylistic and narrative choices have helped him link the national dilemmas addressed in his work to a global landscape. Also focusing on contemporary Peruvian cinema, Ricardo Bedoya has studied the national impact of new practices for the production, distribution, and consumption of films. Bedoya highlights the emergence of a group of film auteurs —Gálvez among them—who gained recognition at international film festivals (2015, p. 67). He notes, however, that while praised by critics, these auteur films failed to attract local audiences. Only a few had good local box office returns (2015, p. 58), and many did not have any commercial distribution in Peru (2015, p. 67). The general disconnect between Peruvian auteur films and the majority of local moviegoers is also discussed by Emilio Bustamante (2018, p. 438). This situation is not exclusive to Peru, since many world cinema auteurs seek and achieve most of their recognition in the international film festival circuit. At the same time, these directors tend to care deeply about the local impact of their films. This is certainly true of Héctor Gálvez.

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Gálvez’s intention to make his films relevant for both local and global audiences can be understood as an example of “double occupancy.” This concept was developed by Thomas Elsaesser to describe the situation of filmmakers who face contradictory demands from competing national and transnational forces (2016, pp. 25–28). Elsaesser observed that the professed internationalist character of all prominent European film festivals can translate for world filmmakers into “an open invitation to self-conscious ethnicity and re-tribalization” (2016, p. 25). In addition to this veiled neocolonialist pressure, Elsaesser notes how directors feel compelled to respond to local demands. Such demands might be explicit, for example, in the obligation to conform to legislation on content, or more tacit, guided by the filmmakers’ innate desire to engage with their national communities. According to Elsaesser, the call to respond to these opposing demands can be challenging, but it also has creative and political potential. In the case of Gálvez, strategies such as his emphasis on the agency of spaces and objects, the evocative use of dialogue, and the elusion of specific references, are all part of his creative approach to navigating this double occupancy. When asked about how his work conjures memories of the Peruvian conflict, Gálvez has said that while he is interested in the past, his films are really about the present.3 This could mean that he is exploring how the structural violence of the past is still operating in present-day Peru, but he could also be alluding to an interest in creating a sense of presence for the audience, thwarting the viewers’ temptation to establish a distance— spatial or temporal—between themselves and the realities evoked by the films. The feeling of immediacy thus created by his films draws in both national and transnational audiences, even if the images conjure different associations in each case. To use Elsaesser’s terminology, one could say that Gálvez confronts the constraints of double occupancy by keeping the stories firmly grounded in Peru, while also compelling global viewers to engage with a sense of presence in his films. I would now like to reflect more specifically on how these strategies work in Paraíso and NN .

Parai´so: Choices in a Restrictive Landscape The project that led to Gálvez’s breakthrough film is significant in itself. The idea for Paraíso was born in the early 2000s, when the director was involved with an NGO called CEPRODEP, which worked in Lima with people displaced from the Andean highlands.4 Gálvez conducted a

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series of filmmaking workshops with teenagers who lived in a marginalized refugee settlement in the outskirts of Lima. This settlement provided the setting for the film, and the young people who participated in the workshops inspired the story, with one of them, Joaquín Ventura, joining the cast as a protagonist. According to Gálvez, many of them were members of violent gangs, but also surprisingly kind young men who participated enthusiastically in the workshops (Gálvez 2009). This experience helped ground the film in a precise geographic and historical moment. The film follows five teenagers from this settlement, called Jardines del Paraíso, as they are ready to start their adult lives. Two girls, Sara (Gabriela Tello) and Antuanet (Yiliana Chong), and one boy, Lalo (William Gómez), are about to finish school. Two other boys, Mario (José Luis García) and Joaquín (Joaquín Ventura) belong to local gangs and take occasional jobs that provide no security. Mario works sporadically at a recycling plant that attracts many people, like him, with few options to make money. Joaquín works briefly at a restaurant where he dresses in a chicken costume to attract customers. Antuanet is the most ambitious, studying hard to obtain a scholarship for a university in Lima—an elusive goal, given the obstacles presented to her by day-to-day life in the settlement. Lalo struggles at school. Sara lives with her mother and wants a future with Mario, her boyfriend. She is also curious about the identity of her father. Her mother has told her that he was a soldier killed by terrorists, but little information about him, and no photographs, have been shared with her. Eventually, we learn that the pregnancy which brought her to the world was, in fact, the result of a gang rape by soldiers. The five protagonists are children of refugees from the armed conflict who, like thousands of others, migrated to the outskirts of Lima during the years of terror. They never witnessed the political violence in the Andes but know about it and live with its consequences. Their marginalization is similar to that experienced by their parents, only now in an urban rather than rural setting. Recent readings of Paraíso have focused on two interrelated aspects of the film: its reflection on the memories of political violence and its portrayal of marginalized urban youth. Víctor Vich (2015) and Giovanna Pollarolo (2019) emphasize the former. Cynthia Vich (2014) and Ricardo Bedoya (2015) focus on the latter. They all discuss how the film connects these two critical issues. Such readings focus mainly on the national relevance of Paraíso and its links to debates on Peruvian social and cultural history. Below, while discussing the ideas of two of these scholars, around the local grounding of Galvez’s first

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film, I also explore how such grounding is supplemented by the film’s transnational reach. Cynthia Vich links Paraíso to a tradition in Peruvian cultural production that conceives peripheral human settlements such as the one presented in the film as atomized and static spaces, separated from an urban center (Lima) perceived as expansive and dynamic. Hinting at the transnational aspects of the story, Vich draws on Lefebvre’s argument about the social production of space to describe the settlement of Jardines del Paraíso—and its portrayal in the film—as the local expression of a global issue: the creation of enclaves where it is easy to access cheap and rapidly available labor (2014, p. 198). She links this situation to social changes brought about by the imposition of the neoliberal model in Peru. She argues that the youngsters see their lack of opportunity as determined by the place in which they live. Indeed, they explicitly say that to improve their lot in life, they need to leave the settlement. Vich’s reading of Paraíso fruitfully reflects on local concerns evoked by the film, while also helping us see how we could easily use this film as a starting point for considering the plight of disadvantaged young people in the periphery of other urban centers around the world. Other national readings connect the struggles of the young protagonists to their parents’ unprocessed memories of violence. Giovanna Pollarolo (2019) points out that the youngsters view their parents’ suffering as alien to their own lives. For her, these young people thereby fail to engage in the collective acknowledgment of traumatic memories that, according to one of the main premises of the CVR, would be necessary for national reconciliation. Claiming that no signs of reconciliation with the past appear in the community depicted in the film, Pollarolo makes reference to a scene where the disjuncture between the young and the old seems particularly pronounced. During a celebration of the fifteenth anniversary of the settlement, two gangs prepare to fight. In the background, loudspeakers play an Andean song that speaks to the feelings experienced by those displaced by the conflict.5 Pollarolo remarks that only the older generation seems moved by the sentiment while the younger one, busy with the gang activity, takes no notice. In my view, the celebration scenes also allude to a continuity between past and present violence. The evocation of the settlers’ violent uprooting in the past is juxtaposed with the actions of the gangs, which signal the violence that afflicts these young people in the present. Shortly after that sequence, Sara learns the truth about her father. This is perhaps the film’s

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most painful scene, and also the one in which the persistence of violence is most pronounced. Drunk to the point of losing self-awareness, Sara’s mother sobbingly recalls the military gang rape that resulted in her pregnancy. Alone with her in the house, Sara listens, discovering that she is the product of that crime. The next morning she looks for Mario and breaks down crying when she finds him wearing a borrowed army uniform—he is preparing to enlist. A further connection with the violent past is established in that image: we see a soldier in the present recalling an unseen one from the past. Evoked here is a continuity of violence that mainly affects people at the margins of society. More specifically, the scene brings to mind an all too common situation in post-conflict contexts around the world, where the legacy of rape as a weapon of war is felt for generations. We are invited to reflect on patterns of structural violence that affect both Sara and her mother, though only one of them was the direct victim of a crime. Gálvez leads the viewer’s attention to the material conditions that make manifest this structural violence. There are several scenes where the camera lets a specific location stay in our minds, by lingering on it after the characters have left the frame. In one example, the young friends are seen talking, while Mario builds a shack on squatted land. Antuanet says that the Incas hid treasures in those arid hills when the Spaniards stole their lands. Mario responds that he would like to find that gold and buy a house with a pool in an upscale neighborhood. She responds that if they found it, they would not be able to touch the gold because it is protected by an Inca chief who watches over from the rocky mountaintop. We see their heads as they turn over to look up, and then the mountain peak comes into view. For a few seconds the camera stays on that peak, where we see a cone-shaped boulder and imagine (or not) that it is the head of the Inca chief. But we also see just another bare mountain in arid terrain, which might be interpreted as a metaphor for the conditions faced by underserved young people in other urban peripheries of our globalized world. With few options in an economic order that deems them expendable, an unattainable hidden treasure appears as their only illusive way to access material benefits—like a house with a pool—associated with a comfortable way of life. Objects are also framed by Gálvez in a way that makes them speak about the marginalization and scarcity that marks the everyday life of the characters. In a scene where a truck delivers water to Antuanet’s house— evidencing the lack of running water in the settlement—the camera

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remains focused for a while on the clear liquid as it is poured over a metal drum. The girl is getting ready to leave for Lima, where she plans to apply for a scholarship. She takes a small bottle out of her bag and slowly fills it with water from the drum. In the next scene, she uses that water to clean her shoes while on the bus, washing off the sand that serves as material evidence of the deficiencies that prevail in the place where she comes from. Her awareness of the limitations imposed on people who live in such a place is made evident in that image, as is her determination to explore other options. Here, the small water bottle becomes a vehicle for that exploration. It evokes both the obstacles she faces and her desire to surmount them. Once again, the scene invites associations with other global contexts where young people face material impediments and struggle to overcome them, equipped only with their own ingenuity and resilience. Just as the characters are able to imagine various life options, viewers can interpret this film in multiple ways. Paraíso is a reflection on the Peruvian armed conflict and its long-lasting effects, but it is also a portrait of marginalized youth on the outskirts of a Latin American (and global) city. Gálvez’s second film, NN , also looks at how past violence is tied to present suffering, now with a focus on the work of people who study remnants from the past. While different from Paraíso in many ways— among them the availability of a larger budget, made possible by this first film’s success—NN is equally interested in bridging local and global concerns.

NN: Bones, Photographs, and Identities Gálvez’s ability to imbue cinematic spaces and objects with agency gains added strength in his second feature. Also known as NN: Sin identidad [NN. Without Identity], the title hints at the film’s premise from the outset: the initials NN (nomen nescio, name unknown) are commonly used in Spanish to mark an unidentified dead body. This film poses questions about what it means to assign an identity to a corpse. Objects play a central role in this process: clothes, accessories, photographs, forensic instruments, and most importantly, bones, are all crucial to the procedures that allow experts to attach a name to a coffin. Gálvez’s camerawork positions such objects at the center of the frame, while also following a team of forensic anthropologists. This team removes bodies from undignified mass graves, works to identify them through objects and DNA tests,

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and places them in coffins marked with their names, so their relatives can give them a proper burial. But the process often does not go smoothly. The film focuses on one case that leaves most questions unanswered. At the beginning of the film, the anthropologists unexpectedly find a ninth body in a grave that was supposed to have only eight. The bones show signs of brutal torture. It is the body of a male and there are no hints about his identity. In his shirt pocket they find the photograph of an equally unidentifiable young woman. Soon after the discovery of this body, an indigenous woman named Graciela (Antonieta Pari), who for decades has looked for the remains of her disappeared husband, identifies a blue sweater found with the corpse as belonging to him. We learn from her son, who shows up to have a DNA test performed, that for years she has suffered from inconsolable grief. When the test reveals that the body is not in fact the woman’s husband, the head of the anthropologists’ team, named Fidel (Paul Vega), confronts an ethical dilemma: should he give this grieving family the body so they can finally have a burial, or should he act professionally and tell them the truth? In the end Fidel decides on the former, after being told by a colleague that no one is looking for the unnamed body and learning that unclaimed ones are ending up dumped on a roofless terrace. Héctor Gálvez has said in interviews that NN was inspired by a reallife story (Hidalgo 2015). A forensic anthropologist told him that while recovering bodies from a mass grave, the exhumation team once found the photograph of a young woman in the shirt pocket of an unidentified male body. But Gálvez’s interest in the exhumation of mass graves can be traced back to his visit to Lucanamarca with the CVR. He has acknowledged that NN continues the work he did in his documentary on the subject. As locally grounded as Paraíso, NN deals with the work undertaken by people involved in collective efforts to confront the effects of the Peruvian armed conflict. In this case, the film’s participation in such local efforts continued after its completion. It became part of a public campaign called Reúne (Reunite), intended to help relatives find the bodies of people who disappeared in the conflict. This campaign led to the approval in May 2016 of a law in Peru that facilitated efforts to locate the bodies of the disappeared. NN was screened in events that supported the effort, and may have contributed to the successful passage of the law.

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The local political impact of NN might have been reinforced by its focus on the concrete conditions that surround the recovery of memories from the armed conflict. Filmed in a dark palette of blues and grays, the film evokes the gloominess of work marked by a daily confrontation with inscrutable pain. With a profusion of static shots, the camera draws our attention to objects, places, and people performing tasks. We see the anthropologists in the expansive mountains of the Andes where the mass graves are located, and then in the enclosed state offices where the forensic work is completed. They assist people who are trying to locate the bodies of loved ones who died in the conflict. We see that the government does not make their task easy. One trial to determine the state’s role in a particular death, in which the anthropologists act as expert witnesses, stalls and leaves relatives frustrated. A mostly anonymous bureaucracy makes their efforts seem futile by focusing on routine tasks and memoranda, while mostly ignoring the symbolic importance of the office’s efforts. We notice that some state-facilitated initiatives are useless. Graciela, for instance, attends a state-sponsored group therapy session that offers little support for her suffering. She only finds relief in knowing that she may have located her husband’s body, and in the personal connection she establishes with Fidel over that longed-for discovery. If Paraíso focused on lives relegated to the margins of society, NN presents us with the equally marginalized lives of people attempting to tell their stories from the grave. The anonymous corpse and the photograph bring these people back from the dead, so to speak, in hopes of a posthumous de-marginalization. But their identities remain unknown. All we get is the black and white picture of a young woman and a collection of bones and clothes carefully arranged over a morgue’s table. We learn along the way that many bodies suffer the same fate, and that many relatives of the disappeared never find their remains. They are denied the benefit of grief, possibly because their lives were (and are) “ungrievable,” a concept used by Judith Butler (Butler 2009) to describe people whose deaths are perceived as inevitable and unimportant “because they are framed as being already lost or forfeited” (2009, p. 31). A connection is established here between the young people living in a peripheral settlement on the outskirts of Lima, and those—including their parents—who lived and died in equally marginalized conditions in the rural Andean towns that were worst hit by the conflict. Using Butler’s terminology, both populations are framed as “ungrievable.”

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Gálvez’s attention to anonymous bodies takes on a particular significance in this light. On the one hand, we are invited to reflect on the connotations of disappearance, a subject of much present-day relevance, both globally (Gatti 2017) and in Peru (Rojas-Pérez 2017). On the other, we are challenged to establish a connection between the dead and the living by way of a parallel between the marginalized lives that were lost in the conflict and the lives of those who survived. The film pays attention to the everyday life of Graciela, and not only in activities related to her quest for her disappeared husband’s body. We see her working as a maid, travelling by bus, and watching TV alone in her house. In those scenes we see the activities and everyday places of a marginalized person, something similar to what we saw in Paraíso. While in that case the camera followed a group of five friends, in this one the focus is more individualized. But both films call attention to the precariousness of the characters’ lives.6 They both also remind us of Gálvez’s interest in the present-day situation of the residents of Lucanamarca, as portrayed in his 2008 documentary, and how he showed that little has changed for them since the time of the conflict. The connection between Graciela and the youngsters from Paraíso is made stronger by the fact that she is played by the same actor who played Sara’s mother in Gálvez’s first film. Any of the five friends could be her child. In fact, we see that Graciela’s son in NN feels as disconnected from her mother’s life in Ayacucho as the protagonists of Paraíso were from their parents’ past. But NN asks that we make an equally significant connection between these marginalized populations and the anthropologists who act as allies in their struggles. Throughout the film the senior anthropologist, Fidel—who has his own personal challenges and suffers from depression—, establishes a bond with Graciela that goes beyond the routine sympathy he shows toward other relatives of the disappeared. He also develops a strong connection with the remains of the unidentified body and the objects found with it, particularly the woman’s photograph. Their evocative power is emphasized in the film. The remains are placed in a secluded place in the morgue, and Fidel is shown staring at them in silence, as if trying to assign them an identity with that stare. He displays enlarged copies of the photograph in public places, hoping to discover the woman’s identity, and always carries the original in a protective bag. In this film, the photograph appears as an object with exceptionally powerful agency.

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The central role played by photographs in disseminating the effects of the armed conflict in Peru is well documented. With the written report of their findings, the CVR released a visual report consisting of multiple photographs that were displayed in the Yuyanapaq exhibit, and seen by thousands of people in Lima.7 Víctor Vich notes that the photographs were important in creating awareness about the armed conflict, even if their overt political effect was debatable (2015, pp. 95–99). Elsewhere in the world, there is much literature on the importance of photographs in contexts of violence. Susan Sontag, in her well-known writings on the subject (1977, 2003), explored both the power and limitations of photographs that display what she eloquently called “the pain of others.” In addition, photographic images of the disappeared have become particularly emblematic in their ability to show the horrors of Latin American dictatorships and wars. There is a sequence in NN where Fidel is shown walking by a long wall covered with such images: dozens of static, blackand-white photographs of people who disappeared during the Peruvian conflict. The camera lingers on the wall for a few seconds after he has left, as though it were giving the pictures enough time to exert their full evocative force. But the image of the young woman is different. As a character in the movie puts it: “That photo’s not even of a disappeared person.” The anthropologists are not sure what to do with that photograph; it challenges established mechanisms of memory. Fidel’s fascination with the photograph might be related to his own inability to examine it using regular scientific methods. It is an object that tests the limits of his expertise. Later in the film he goes to the national ID registry and asks for all the pictures of women of an age similar to the one estimated for the girl in the photograph. He quickly realizes the futility of that approach, after looking at a seemingly endless display of female faces, one after another, on a computer screen. Writing about the film in specific reference to Peru’s recent history, Lucero de Vivanco (2015) discusses how it addresses the confrontation of affective and scientific paradigms in the recovery of memories from the armed conflict—this scene provides one example of that confrontation. More broadly, the film pays attention to the emotional toll of efforts to assist in the recovery from the effects of war. Fidel and his team act professionally, focusing on the task at hand, but often have arguments over the most ethical course of action, or struggle to hold back tears, as happens to one of them after unearthing a baby’s dress from a mass grave.

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The issues addressed in this film go well beyond the Peruvian conflict. For those familiar with the political violence that ravaged the country at the end of the twentieth century, it will be evident that this is its main frame of reference. Those familiar with Héctor Gálvez’s trajectory will also be aware of the deeply localized origin of this film. NN reproduces quite faithfully the work performed by the Peruvian Team of Forensic Anthropology and the places where they work. At the same time, the film makes only scarce references to specific places, dates, or events. Patricia Wiese (2015) has said of NN that its dramatic action could have taken place in Rwanda or Kosovo, because what really matters in this film is the human drama. Such ability to address fundamental humanitarian issues faced in other post-conflict contexts gives NN a relevance that goes beyond the national situation. The same might be said about Paraíso’s attention to the lives of youngsters living at the margins of an urban center in the socalled Global South. This expansive appeal of Gálvez’s films—what I call their transnational reach—is not just a result of their thematic focus. It is equally linked to how the director frames the material conditions of the characters’ struggles, engaging spectators through his evocative treatment of cinematic spaces and objects.

Conclusion I started this chapter by highlighting the agency of spaces and objects in the films of Héctor Gálvez. I would like to conclude by saying that such agency is inseparable from the human interactions that occur in those spaces and through the mediation of those objects. The camera gives spaces and objects a prominent role in both Paraíso and NN in order to highlight the materiality of the obstacles faced by the films’ characters. Gálvez has said in interviews that the antagonists in his films are not other people, but a reality faced by the protagonists (Ramos and Rojas 2015). That reality is at once material and evocative. The settlement where they live robs the youngsters of options; the infrastructure that surrounds the forensic anthropologists hinders their work. Human interaction with these environments is strenuous and charged with powerful meanings. Such interaction also brings out the resilience of the characters and their tenacity in looking for ways to breach the barriers that block their way. Most significantly, this cinematic approach to human drama allows for local and transnational interpretations that are, in either case, firmly grounded in concrete geographies and histories.

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Notes 1. This group includes, among others, directors Josué Méndez, Claudia Llosa, Rosario García Montero, Diego and Daniel Vega, and Álvaro Delgado Aparicio. 2. The CVR was set up at a time of reckoning in Peru. After the capture in 1992 of Shining Path’s leader, Abimael Guzmán, and the resignation in 2000 of disgraced president Alberto Fujimori, the violent conflict that had ravaged the country since the early 1980s was considered to be over, and so the work of the CVR began. 3. In researching this chapter, I consulted many interviews with Gálvez from different stages in his career. He comments on his interest in the present, rather than in the past, in almost every one, most specifically in his interview with Diana Hidalgo (2015). 4. CEPRODEP (Centro de Promoción y Desarrollo Poblacional ) was created in 1986 by a group of Ayacucho civic leaders who sought refuge in Lima. For eighteen years it supported displaced populations in the city through initiatives like the workshops led by Gálvez. For more information see their website: http://www.ceprodep.org.pe/. 5. This song is Huérfano pajarillo [Orphan Bird], by Ayacuchean composer Carlos Falconí, who sings it in the film. 6. The concept of precariousness has been used extensively, including by Judith Butler (2004), to understand living conditions in the age of globalization. For a collection of studies on precariousness in Latin American cinema see Burucúa and Sitnisky (2018). 7. The exhibit first opened in 2003 and a catalog with its photographs sold out quickly. The collection is currently housed in the Museo de la Nación in Lima.

Works Cited Barrow, S., 2018. Contemporary Peruvian Cinema: History, Identity and Violence on Screen. London: I. B. Tauris. Bedoya, R., 2015. El cine peruano en tiempos digitales. Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Universidad de Lima. Burucúa, C. and Sitnisky, C., eds. 2018. The Precarious in the Cinema of the Americas. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Bustamante, E., 2018. El nuevo cine peruano: un panorama. Modern Language Notes, 133(2), pp. 435–451. Butler, J., 2004. Precarious Life. New York: Verso. Butler, J., 2009. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? New York: Verso.

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Coole, D. and Frost, S., 2010. New Materialisms. Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham NC: Duke University Press. De Vivanco, L., 2015. Cerca de los afectos: NN. Sin identidad (memoria y derechos humanos en el cine peruano). Letras en línea, [online] 30 December. Available at: http://letrasenlinea.merca.cl/cerca-de-los-afectos-nn-sin-identi dad-memoria-y-derechos-humanos-en-el-cine-peruano/ [Accessed 14 March 2020]. Elsaesser, T., 2016. The Global Author: Control, Creative Constraints, and Performative Self-Contradiction. In: S. Jeong and J. Szaniawski, eds. 2016. The Global Auteur. New York: Bloomsbury. pp. 21–42. Gálvez, H., 2009. Paraíso, de Héctor Gálvez. Interviewed by Diario Correo. [video online] 7 September. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=VHT6R6FPeuw [Accessed 14 March 2020]. Gatti, G., ed. 2017. Desapariciones: usos locales, circulaciones globales. Bogotá: Siglo del Hombre Editores and Universidad de los Andes. Hidalgo, D., 2015. Héctor Gálvez: NN habla de un tema actual. Perú21 [online] 15 September. Available at: https://peru21.pe/cultura/hector-Gálvez-nnhabla-tema-actual-196485 [Accessed 14 March 2020]. Lefebvre, H., 1974. The Production of Space. Translated from French by D. Nicholson-Smith. 1991. Oxford: Blackwell. Lucanamarca, 2008. [film] Directed by Héctor Gálvez and Carlos Cárdenas. Peru: TV Cultura. Nagib, L., Perriam, C. and Dudrah, R., 2012. Theorizing World Cinema. London: I. B. Tauris. NN , 2014. [film] Directed by Héctor Gálvez. Peru, Colombia, Germany, and France: Piedra Alada Producciones, Séptima Films, Autentika Films, MPM Films. Paraíso [Paradise], 2009. [film] Directed by Héctor Gálvez. Peru, Spain, and Germany: Chullachaki Producciones, Ulysses Films, Oasis PC, and Neue Cameo Film. Pollarolo, G., 2019. Transmission of Memory in Héctor Gálvez’s Paraiso. In: M. Paz-Mackay and O. Rodriguez, eds. Politics of Children in Latin American Cinema. New York: Lexington Books. pp. 183–196. Ramos, L. and Rojas, L., 2015. Entrevista con Héctor Gálvez, director de NN: Sin identidad. Una película de fantasmas. Cinencuentro [online] 15 September. Available at: https://www.cinencuentro.com/2015/09/15/nnsin-identidad-entrevista-hector-galvez-pelicula-peruana/ [Accessed 14 March 2020]. Rojas-Pérez, I., 2017. Mourning Remains. State Atrocity, Exhumations, and Governing the Disappeared in Peru’s Post-War Andes. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. Sontag, S., 1977. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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Sontag, S., 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Vich, C., 2014. Geografía de la precariedad: una lectura de Paraíso de Héctor Gálvez. Nuevo Texto Crítico, 26(49)–27(50), pp. 195–206. Vich, V., 2015. Poéticas del duelo. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos. Wiese, P., 2015.NN Sin identidad. Mentira, justicia y reparación. Cinencuentro, [online] 13 October. Available at: https://www.cinencuentro.com/2015/ 10/13/nn-sin-identidad-mentira-justicia-y-reparacion/ [Accessed 14 March 2020].

CHAPTER 11

The Peruvian Short Film: Styles and Treatments of Memory, Politics, and Violence Ricardo Bedoya

The Short Film in Peru For two decades, between 1972 and 1992, the short film was both a creative and a money-making activity in Peru. A law passed in March 1972 by the de facto government of General Juan Velasco Alvarado laid the groundwork for this. Among other stimuli for film production, this law implemented a system of mandatory showings of short films in Peruvian cinemas. Under the law, all public showings of a foreign feature film had to be accompanied by the projection of a Peruvian short. In return, the production company received a percentage of the municipal tax levied on the value of the tickets sold. Under these conditions, short films were projected, for a week’s time, in each of the cinemas that existed in the country at the time, provided the approval and endorsement of a state agency created for this purpose.

R. Bedoya (B) Universidad de Lima, Lima, Peru e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 C. Vich and S. Barrow (eds.), Peruvian Cinema of the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52512-5_11

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With a captive audience, short films earned considerable profit, benefitting from a portion of the taxes generated from showings of the high-profit blockbusters of those years. During the seventies and eighties, almost 1500 short films were produced in Peru. Some did not receive the necessary endorsement for their mandatory showing for various reasons, sometimes resulting from the ideological criteria applied by the military regime of the day. Under these conditions, the short film bore not only economic fruits; it also became the format that allowed for the consolidation of the technical and expressive expertise of new filmmakers who were preparing to move on to productions of greater magnitude. This was the case of Francisco Lombardi, Alberto Durant, Augusto Tamayo, and Nora de Izcue, among other filmmakers whose careers developed in the following years. However, this experience ended in 1992, when the government of Alberto Fujimori, imposing liberal reforms upon the Peruvian economy, repealed the promotional law. With the system of obligatory showings and tax repayment swept away, short films could no longer find their way into cinemas. In 1994, a new film law was proclaimed. It makes no mention of special treatment for short films. This system, still in place at the time of writing, based on contests and nonrefundable monetary awards, eliminated the indirect tax subsidy to producers. The new legal rules, in keeping with liberal orthodoxy, also made no provisions for media channels to show short films. After the decline in production that came with the repeal of the system implementing mandatory showings of short films, and in spite of a lack of profits, the production of short films has taken on an unexpected dynamism since the year 2000. This is driven by young people, especially students of Communications and Audiovisual Production courses taught in institutions in all regions of Peru. Without a doubt, the eruption of the digital age has caused an increase in production exceeding the results of any legal provision. As they cannot be measured in economic terms, the profits offered by short films are measured in terms of cultural value or in expressive affirmation. In both of these areas, the balance is positive. There have been experiments in the fields of fiction, documentary, animation, and hybrid forms. But there is a negative side: young directors, after having produced one or two shorts, abandon their filmmaking activities because resources are scarce or their work does not find adequate exhibition circuits. Multiplex auditoriums are not welcoming venues for short films, and television channels—with some exceptions—are not either.

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With regard to the subjects addressed in documentary short films, new Peruvian filmmakers use these works to tell the stories of their urban wanderings or to reconcile their still-forming identities, but also to highlight the political violence Peru has experienced in the recent past. This essay is centered on five Peruvian short films from recent years. Some dramatize the stories their filmmakers heard from their parents about the internal armed conflict that tore the country apart for twenty years (1980– 2000). Others find alternative means of representing the social conflicts provoked by the economic and cultural gulfs that still exist between Peruvians. My intention is to focus on short films that make reference to different types of political conflicts related to distinct historical circumstances of contemporary Peru. The first three, Wakcha (2017) by Pierre G. Llanos, Reminiscencia 2 [Reminiscence 2] (2018) by Piero Parra Solar, and Raccaya-Umasi (2011) by Vicente Cueto, offer representations of the aftermaths of the violent actions that disrupted various communities of the Ayacucho region during the years of the internal armed conflict (1980–2000). I will go on to discuss how these films develop themes related to memory, personal responsibilities, unresolved policies, the incomplete reconciliation of the Peruvian state, and the challenge of confronting the past, as well as how they differ in their respective treatments of these themes. Wakcha and Reminiscencia 2 dramatize the encounter, thirty years later, of two characters involved in the violence of the past. Raccaya-Umasi chooses the path of documentary recreation. The other two shorts, Bagua (2009) by Mauricio Godoy and Solo te puedo mostrar el color [I Can Only Show You the Color] (2014) by Fernando Vílchez, address more recent acts of social violence related to economic development under the liberal economic model. Both opt for more elusive paths of representation: in the first short, found footage obscures meanings and is examined from the perspective of the present. As JeanLouis Comolli (Taccetta and Véliz 2014) would say, the study of archives, of the footprints they contain, allows us to understand the present. The second short is an example of the performative documentary presented in the first person, recording collective representations in order to highlight not only the traumas of the past, but also representations of cultural traditions rooted in an Amazonian community (Taylor 2012, p. 35).

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Memories, Spaces, and Time In 1980, Peru’s internal armed conflict began, pitting the Maoist group named Shining Path against the Peruvian state and society in general. Up to the year 2000, the conflict claimed a toll of 69,280 people dead or disappeared, according to estimates of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2003). During this period, the Shining Path committed terrorist acts and a great number of crimes against the citizens of Peru, targeting mostly members of Andean and Quechua-speaking communities. The conflict brought with it a campaign of military and police repression that, in certain places and under certain circumstances, provoked multiple violations of human rights. These violations form part of the basis of the plots of the shorts Wakcha, Reminiscencia 2, and Raccaya-Umasi. Wakcha, written and directed by Pierre G. Llanos, is a short film of narrative fiction produced under the auspices of an audiovisual production course at the Universidad de Lima and shown only in local festivals. The producer and screenwriter, as well as the members of the technical team, were students of the Communications Department of the same university. In Wakcha—a Quechua word referring to a person living in a state of poverty, having been dispossessed of his or her land of origin—two spaces alternate on the screen. One is rural, located in the heights of the Peruvian Andes; this space appears in brief flashes, dispersed throughout the development of the central situation. At the start, this shining place is the setting for an ambiguous situation. A little girl clambers up a slope in an open, rocky space. She is a young peasant child, who might well be playing, but in fact she is running away. From somewhere out of the frame comes the sound of unceasing gunshots. Suddenly, a jump cut takes us to another time and place. Almost level with the ground, the camera follows the footsteps of a woman (Sylvia Majo) as she walks through the interior spaces of a high-class Lima house. The frame only shows her feet, shod in modern tennis shoes. Barely even her ankles are visible. The tracking shot stays close behind her as she walks, sometimes sure of herself, sometimes indecisive, but always taking indefinite paths. This closed-in shot allows for scarcely a glimpse of the space around her. Another brief insert links the little girl’s progress through the countryside, in her effort to escape, to the woman in Lima. In the soundtrack, a few overlaid noises become audible. They are work noises: little clinks, something made of metal. The woman’s hustle and

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bustle pauses. With the frame always centered on the movement of her feet, the woman crosses clearly lit spaces until she enters into a shadowy space. Her footsteps become sneaky, stealthy. She crosses a short distance shrouded in darkness. Then she pauses, and her silhouette appears on the threshold of a room. The shot opens up, but does not reveal her expression. Her face remains in an opaque patch, leaving an empty space in the frame. In the reverse shot, a man (Germán Gonzales) appears; he is doing plumbing work in the house. From the shadowy threshold, the woman offers the worker a soft drink. The plumber, silent, responds with a mechanical gesture of acceptance. He drinks, and then continues his work in silence. It is then that the face of the woman, identifiable as a domestic servant, becomes progressively visible. While the camera approaches until her face is presented in a close-up, the character’s expression reveals her seclusion: this woman is wrapped up in herself and in her memories. The tolling of a bell enters from the past, as an extradiegetic and suspensive addition to the soundtrack. Another insert, identifiable as a flashback, shows the little girl’s face from up close. These initial shots condense the tensions that exist throughout Wakcha and establish a temporality that imbues the situation with unease. The framing separates the characters. The woman appears huddled in the shadows. The man to whom she speaks is shown to be absorbed in his work. Between them is a clear gulf of personal, social, and cultural differences. Still, the space materializes a connection that may be invisible, but that exists nonetheless, about to be revealed. This link is built upon the events that took place during the years of violence. Memory shapes a space of dramatic confrontation and drives forward a narrative that dramatizes the encounter between a woman abused in the past and an “apparition” who emerges like a ghost from the same past. What follows is an otherworldly dialog that separates the woman’s questions and statements from her true motivation. Insistent, not moving from the threshold where she stands, she asks the worker questions. She asks him about his private life and his family. But, like a groundswell containing the traces of what has occurred in both of their pasts, these appeals refer back to the images of multiple absences. The plumber’s tools are associated with the instruments of a craftsman of church altarpieces from Ayacucho: the woman’s father, who was a victim of the violence. The space she occupies, in the room’s threshold, standing in front of the

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crouching worker, refers back to the inverse position of a soldier looming over a terrified little girl thirty years before. The plumber, with his back turned, refuses to answer. Accepting this rejection, the woman retreats to the kitchen, where she stays silent, expectant, for quite some time. Then, the possibilities of vengeance, forgetting, or redemption are laid out before her. This is the point when the dramatic strategies that will articulate the development of the film’s actions are defined. The memory of the Peruvian internal armed conflict is not exhausted in the simple illustration of an anecdote; rather, this memory situates an individual moment within a greater landscape of social difference, cultural prejudice, and gendered violence. After coming face to face with him, the woman—humiliated three decades before by this man who now appears in the house where she works—becomes doubtful, and her expectant attitude opens up to ambiguity. Possibilities of vengeance or forgiveness are outlined in an unstable diegetic time frame that allows for no guessing at any particular dramatic resolution. Instead, it conjures up several possibilities. Assuming a moral position, adopting the mannerisms that will allow her to face the facts of her past with lucidity, the woman falls into a state of fleeting inactivity. The dead time continues, lacking any external dramatic action for a few minutes. This static scene leads the viewer to inquire into the mode by which the past is materialized in the present. In Wakcha, the woman enters fully into a liminal time and space. She weighs up her current position, she recapitulates her memory, she seeks the most appropriate reaction to this encounter that throws her world into disorder. This moment of silent waiting, with the camera showing the details of the kitchen in half-light, transforms the act of waiting itself into a dramatic element. The piecemeal release and withholding of information is fundamental. Temporal dilation and space illuminated in low light take on a presence all their own, not subject to the orientation of narrative actions. The same change can be heard as the noises on the soundtrack grow louder. Liminality is a space of magnified suspense, an exacerbated sensoriality. The shadows form an apt environment for an internal ethical conflict that matures during this period of reflection, which is also the first step toward a final decision. The processes of memory enter into operation, but so do the tensions of power that mark gender relations. The suspension of any real action gives rise to various possible suppositions. Might this be a form of revenge in which pain inevitably mixes with desire? Can the man’s indifference

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to the woman’s appeals be explained by his haste and concentration, or rather by a classist prejudice separating the worker (from the capital city of Lima) from the domestic employee (of Andean origin)? A change in expository rhythm leads the viewer toward the film’s resolution. Still in a state of uncertainty, the viewer witnesses the preparation of a traditional Andean soup known as patasca. Cuts stretch out the duration of each frame and show the details of the ingredients and the knife with which the woman cuts the beef for the dish. The two alternatives of punishment or pardon come into play. The preparation of the patasca, which will be offered to the man, takes on a character of perverse rituality. The offering of food becomes a way to call out this agent of the past, to bring him face to face with her memory, to force him to recognize his connection to an Andean culture he tries to deny. At the same time, this is the dramatic resource that opens the door to uncertainty. Is the soup poisoned, like in Madeinusa (Claudia Llosa 2006)? Is it the tool that will allow her to get even with the man who threatened and humiliated her? Is it a means of appealing to memory by putting the victimizer in contact with the most organic and visceral of materials, like the piece of tripe floating in the soup? The situation’s resolution is interrupted by the arrival of the lady of the house and the plumber’s departure. Neither vengeance nor pardon. The film’s political vision is made clear. The lady’s arrival, as a representative of the privileged Limeño class—which prefers not to remember, thereby denying the need to clear the collective conscience of the past— cuts off the encounter between victim and victimizer. It prevents memory from running its course. The possibilities of condemnation and punishment fall through. Forgiveness never comes. Forgetting repairs nothing. Reconciliation is no longer possible. The grievances of the past live on. Reminiscencia2 is a product of the fertile film scene of Ayacucho, a mountainous region in southern Peru, where film production has been consistent and increasing since 1996, as has been studied by Bustamante and Luna Victoria (2017). Directed, produced, and distributed via alternative means by Piero Parra Solar, the film begins with a title card informing the viewer of the context to which the dramatic situation refers. In March of 1982, a Shining Path cell violently took over the jail of the city of Ayacucho in order to free the terrorists imprisoned there. The actions represented in this short film begin more than three decades after these events.

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On a street in the city of Huamanga, an older man (Ladislao Parra Bello) observes the facade of a building with features typical of traditional local architecture. Approaching the doorway, he sits on the front steps and lights a cigarette. A young woman (Edith Margot La Rosa Toro Leguía), just arriving at the same place, asks him if he’s looking for someone. The man says no. Nonetheless, not long later, he succeeds in entering the building, gaining access through a corridor that leads to a house with Andean-style tiles and an inner patio. Surprised inside by the young woman, he explains that he is just passing through Ayacucho after having lived in Lima for thirty years, and he wanted to see, once again, the house that saved his life back in March of 1982, the night of Shining Path’s attack on the city jail. This situation sets the scene for the basic narrative scheme of the short, which stretches out into a dialog between the man, a retired military police officer, and the young woman, who now lives in the house. Over the course of this dialog, the present-day presentation of a traumatic memory is interlaced with the dramatization of the episodes of that night of violence. In this film, unlike in Wakcha, memory spurs on a performance of the events recalled by this man who sought shelter in the patio of a house in Ayacucho during the battle for control of its prison. It is the same house where he lived through an act of private violence of which he cannot speak, because it is, for him, unsayable: he shot a fellow officer who attempted to rape the occupant of the house, after accusing her of being a terrorist. For the soldier, the past is made present, thirty years later, through bodily contact with the texture of the walls of the corridor leading to the building’s patio. He runs the palm of his hand over the stones of the entryway’s walls. The spaces are impregnated with this personal memory, and they play the role of a stage set. Here, while he tells the story of his experience, he acts out his own role, the same one he played years before. He evokes his own fear, he advances like a sneaking assailant, he “plays” at being what he was that night. The soundtrack reproduces the gunshots and explosions of that long-ago moment. Analyzing Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da [Once Upon a Time in Anatolia] (2011) by Nuri Bilge Ceylan and La mujer sin cabeza [The Headless Woman] (2008) by Lucrecia Martel, based on arguments put forward by George Herbert Mead, Adam Ochonicky (2018) observes that, in these films, the past produces the present and is incarnated in spaces represented as ghosts of absence. In Reminiscencia 2, the spaces of a building

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in the city of Huamanga are linked to the disturbed subjectivity of a character unable to cut the ties that bind him to the past. This connection acquires consistency in the opacity that marks the representation of the house’s corridors. With its shadows and darkened backgrounds, forcing us to guess at the hallways’ width, this space not only calls to mind a minefield one must cross by night; it also acts as an area “out of bounds,” condensing the notion of what took place and what remains latent, awaiting some form of resolution. This space, haunted by the “ghosts of absence,” is situated between two depicted actions: the action that took place in 1982, which already has the otherworldly consistency of historical memory (complete with disappearances, sexual wrongdoings, and other acts of barbarity), and the action that is sparked by the woman giving the former military officer permission to enter this house so central to his past. But the encounter between the old soldier and the young woman lends another meaning to the short. This meeting establishes a connection between a subject who was an agent of the violent acts of the past, and who carries with him the memory of these acts, and a woman who only knows them as stories passed down by others. This woman has only the experience of post-memory, having grown up exposed to narratives that preceded her own birth (Hirsch 1997, p. 22). The perspective of the young woman from Ayacucho who finds out what happened in the building where she now lives is the perspective of one who knows violence only secondhand, or who has received only the version handed down by her parents.1 In the time period depicted in Reminiscencia 2, which corresponds to that present produced by the past, the young woman makes inquiries into what took place. The old soldier tells only part of the story, failing to mention his fellow soldier’s attempt to rape a woman who sought help in the precarious shelter offered by the house. The young woman asks the old police officer to finish his story, but this does not happen. The man asks the woman how old she is. “I’m thirty-two,” she says. Upon hearing this answer, the man begins to walk away. The woman insists, after this sudden interruption in his tale, “Sir, what else happened?” The film ends with a drawn-out frame: a close-up of the young woman’s disconcerted face. This final expression calls to mind the point of view of the filmmaker, himself a young man from Ayacucho, who dramatizes the experience of the violence that once shook his native region, taking the stories told by

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his elders as a reference point. The question of “What else happened?” formulated by the character in the short is a question shared by those who did not live through the violence and who are not satisfied by the fragmentary narratives that reach them today. Those who keep asking. Once again, as in Wakcha, the answers are left in suspense. The documentary Raccaya-Umasi, by Vicente Cueto, was produced as part of a documentary production workshop organized by Docuperú, a nonprofit organization that shares technical education and documentary filmmaking practice in various regions of Peru. The film documents a public hearing organized by the Peruvian Forensic Anthropology Team. At this hearing, the team displays clothing found in gravesites hidden in the community of Raccaya, in the Ayacucho region. The goal of the hearing is to determine the identity of the disappeared, checking the exhumed remains against the memories of surviving family members. In 1983, in this small town in Ayacucho, fifty-five community members were kidnapped by Shining Path. Against their will and under threat of death, these community members were led to a schoolhouse located within the nearby Umasi annex, where they were to be indoctrinated. A few hours later, while the hostages rested, a military patrol unit surrounded the school and opened fire on its occupants. Later, the soldiers buried the bodies in hidden graves (Asociación Pro Derechos Humanos 2018). Thirty years later, Vicente Cueto’s documentary follows the families of the disappeared as they cross-check their memories, recall the day when their relatives were removed from their community, and attempt to specify the color or type of clothing they were wearing at the time. The doubt, hesitation, and imprecision of memory are at the center of this short film. The selectivity of the focus becomes the formal tool that articulates the film’s documentary register. Raccaya-Umasi unfolds into a blurred snapshot, transformed into a “principle of writing” (Comolli and Sorrel 2015, p. 187) that formalizes the essential notion of uncertain memory and of its successive variations in focus. In Raccaya-Umasi, images that first emerge in perfect definition end up dissolving. Complete impressions become diffuse. Martine Beugnet (2017, p. 22) notes that soft focus, as an element of imagistic punctuation, tends to remain at the margins of the “useful areas” of the frame: those areas that attract the guided gaze of the viewer. But what happens when soft focus becomes central and takes over the whole surface of the frame?

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The film opens with the silhouette of an older woman. In the background, the outline of a hill in the city of Lima is visible, with its slopes covered in dwellings constructed by Andean internal migrants and their descendants. In the soundtrack, the complaints or lamentations of a Quechua-speaking woman are audible. She has spent decades of her life trying to find and identify her dead, and now she is about to attend yet another hearing for this purpose. “I’ve come to Lima two times to listen, I’ve come to find out,” she says. This introduction reveals the short’s central concerns: fruitless waiting, the indifference of state authorities, the divorce between the real expectations held by the relatives of the disappeared and the failure of institutions to satisfy them. This is the grievance of a citizen not treated as a citizen. Once the hearing begins, everything starts to blur. The use of selective focus and long focal lengths squashes spaces, superimposes the silhouettes of the attendees upon each other, and prevents a complete vision of the setting. This visual impression points to the perceptive confusion of the attendees, who are never able to find the calm that would allow them to verify the contents of their own memories. Faced with the images of recovered clothing, their expressions—always out of focus—show only anxiety. The attendees of this assembly of bereaved relatives, incarnations of the present, are soaked through by light, making them appear ghostly, as evanescent as the vestiges they do their best to recognize. Memory becomes otherworldly. What is absent from these images is also absent from the consciousness of the family members and the forensic anthropologists who devote themselves to this task of (im)possible recognition. The open spaces of the assembly room, apt for a direct, realistic register, become spaces occupied by uncertain, unsettled subjectivities. Images of the present are taken over by figures of absence. The projected images of the threadbare garments serve as evidence only of the garment’s own corrosion. Observing them, having trouble recognizing them, the family members exchange words of perplexity and disappointment. In the midst of this uncertainty, all that can be distinguished is a chromatic composition. A red and white garment, like the Peruvian flag, is reflected against the outline of a woman’s body. The citizens of the country represented by this flag are unable to identify their fellow citizens. The blurred identity of those who disappeared runs parallel to the uncertain consciousness of those who try to recognize them. The vestiges of the crime committed thirty years prior point

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only to impossibilities: not only the impossibility of recognizing something that was absent for decades, but also the impossibility of achieving justice, finding the peace necessary to identify the garments, and giving them a symbolic burial.

Bagua Represented Through the Images and Voices of Others In June of 2009, during the second term of Peruvian president Alan García Pérez (2006–2011), major conflicts took place in the communal territory of the Awajún and Wampi peoples in the area of the Amazon rainforest near Peru’s border with Ecuador. This social conflict was provoked by the native communities’ rejection of a set of laws they considered harmful and confiscatory with regard to their communal lands. These legal changes opened the door for the extraction of natural resources and raw materials, including petroleum, from the lands in question. After fifty-six days of conflict, as a part of their protest, the community members took control of a gas station and shut down traffic on a highway leading to the city of Bagua. Police developed a strategy to clear out the occupation in the area known as Curva del Diablo, “the devil’s curve,” but this strategy failed and violence broke out. Thirty-three people—twenty-one indigenous and twelve police—lost their lives. The short Solo te puedo mostrar el color, by Fernando Vílchez Rodríguez, was produced in Santa Rosa Pankintsa, the home of an Awajún community, with the purpose of recovering the memory of a recent event that left a deep mark on the social life of the community. Its production was the result of a personal effort on the part of the filmmaker, and it has been shown in parallel exhibition circuits and in a few festivals specialized in exhibiting documentaries. The first moments of the short show the filmmaker, a resident of Lima, arriving to undertake a field study in the community, in the style of an ethnography. The filmmaker and his team ask the leaders of the Awajún community to allow them to record versions of the story from the mouths of its protagonists, who were demonized by Peru’s political class due to the murders of police during the clash. According to testimony given by Vílchez himself, in exchange for permission to produce the film, the community requires that the production team provide community members with instruction in a technique or a field of knowledge that the community might later master, share, and pass on. In response,

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the production team puts on a video-making workshop for local youth. As additional compensation, they promise to leave their technical equipment behind so the community can later use it to record and pass on information (Vílchez 2014). The form and circumstances of the film’s production point also to its style and its purposes. Solo te puedo mostrar el color incorporates, in a series of successive levels, these elements of negotiation with the community. This explains the use of various documentary resources that allows the film to recapitulate the violent events that took place just a few years prior, as well as the presence of elements that refer to both the hybrid imaginations of communal self-representation and the influence of transnational cinema. Found footage, including news reports and personal recordings of the events that took place in Bagua, gives way to a unique choice: to communally produce video in the mold of full contact combat, in the style of Jean-Claude Van Damme. After the real battles of the past, the community members recreate new body-to-body confrontations, this time theatrical and without mortal consequences. This is a performative exercise, acted out as if it were a compensatory role-play to ease the communal pain of the past. The youngest members of the Awajún community, seemingly invincible, are shown defeating their fictitious antagonists. Sarah Pink and Leder Mackley (2014), in their work on visual ethnography, point out that memory cannot be understood when separated from imagination. In fact, memory can be understood as a form of imagination. This is proven in Solo te puedo mostrar el color. In the practical exercise of video and martial arts, Awajún youth act out a battle between good guys and villains that interlaces memory and imagination; better yet, they demonstrate a method of looking into their own identity and constructing themselves, taking as references the movie heroes they have encountered through pirated DVDs found in local marketplaces. But this fictitious reenactment is also a mode of interrogating past times and places, of wondering if such idealized fantasies are still possible in this part of the Peruvian Amazon. These questions lend particular importance to the final sequence, an apparent departure from those that come before it. A young Awajún man, half naked, carries a machete and hacks at a tree. The scene has the appearance of an inserted moment of choreography. It has the ritual aspect of a dance, but it is not clear whether

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it is a dance or not. It could be a way of releasing anger or a demonstration of ancestral aggression. All that can be said for sure is that it provokes an excision in the film’s expository development, and it throws its temporality off-center. From when do these images come? Are they from a past prior to the violence, or do they seek to represent an “essential gesture” of the Awajún warrior, beyond the immediate circumstances? But the young workshop participants are not the only ones engaging in performative acts. Such performance is also present in the acting presence of the filmmaker, in his reflections via voiceover, in the act of recovering voices from past archives, and in actively recording the scenes enacted by the youth. Staging their battles is a mode of performance in itself. So is organizing the film as a travel diary, telling the story of the journey from one place to another, and as a series of notes on the shoot itself. On top of all this rests the attempt at counter-information that this film proposes. The urban filmmaker’s desire to enter the Amazon communicates his will to dig up images that were not transmitted by the media, or that were assigned meaning according to the interests of those in power. This relationship with found footage calls attention to the filmmaker’s intervention and his conversion into a “social actor.” Antonio Weinrichter (2015) points out that a particular usefulness of the performativity of archives is found in recognizing, in the material used, a new source of enunciation expressed in speaking through the voice of others. The filmmaker’s personal enunciation is empowered by the expressions, accents, and intonations of others in order to empower them in turn, contrast them with official information about the events at Bagua, take a critical position regarding the incident, and affirm that, years later, the problem of punishment for those responsible for the deaths is still outstanding. By means of fiction or performativity and found footage, Peruvian filmmakers use short films to reflect on the outstanding accounts of a violent past. The same critical tone and the same performativity are present in Bagua (2009) by Mauricio Godoy, which also builds on archival recordings. This “found material” has no visible or demonstrable identification or authorship. A note indicates that it was found on YouTube. These are the images and the speech of others. The production of this short was undertaken using the filmmaker’s own resources, and it has been disseminated through YouTube.

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The short consists of a single uninterrupted shot, a little more than one minute long. The sequence shows a journey down an Amazonian highway. In the background, the lush rainforest is visible. The camera, located inside the vehicle, makes panoramic (if unstable) horizontal movements. In perspective, the stark line of the horizon and the clear highway can be seen. Perhaps this is the way to the city of Bagua, where the violent events of 2009 took place. In spite of the absence of people, the soundtrack plays the voice of a woman expressing herself indignantly in the Awajún language. Her cries, her sobbing, and her faltering diction seem to impugn everything: this is not just a demand to know the whereabouts of her family; it is a lamentation and a protest. The viewer recognizes this by accent, rhythm, phrasing, and vocalization. The explicit meaning of the words is not needed. This act of appropriation by the filmmaker represents an act of undermining and, paradoxically, of pristine communication. On the one hand, it dissociates the words from their evident meaning. For the great majority of viewers, ignorant of the Awajún language, this woman’s words provide no information whatsoever. But her speech is rich in significance nonetheless, and the emotional power of her intonation plays the role of a direct appeal. The unintelligible phrases do not prevent the exacerbation of paralinguistic elements from establishing a link that transcends cultural differences, just as it marks the breaches that separate some Peruvians from others. Within this frenzied discourse in Awajún, a familiar word stands out: the name of the president of Peru at the time when the violence broke out. The word is repeated with the regularity of a refrain or a litany. Its intonation transforms the name itself into an allegation of guilt. This is the only word to appear in subtitles: the only word a viewer not competent in the Awajún language would be able to recognize. Making this choice “vindicates the performative in its linguistic acceptance: not ‘this means or denotes that’ but ‘I make this mean or denote that’ (without losing its original character from sight)” (Weinrichter 2015). The subtitles and the selection of this fragment of speech show the filmmaker speaking with the voice of others. Through this intervention, the original text attributes to the voice a political perspective that passes judgment upon those grave acts of violence. The filmmaker’s identification with this voice points to shared indignation and shared pain, and also to the difficulty of forgiveness and reconciliation.

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Conclusion Margarita Saona has studied the ways in which photography, performance, and plastic arts, as much as traditional art, have contributed to the construction of a culture of memory, resisting “the temptation of those who insist on the need to ‘close this painful chapter’ or ‘turn the page’ for the good of progress” (2017, pp. 34–37). The shorts mentioned here are aligned with the same current followed by all these artistic practices in Peru since the eighties. At the same time, they not only trust in the power of images and sounds to reveal political and social circumstances that must not be forgotten: by means of documentary or fiction, they also contribute arguments to the debate over the defense of human rights in contemporary Peru. This chapter was translated by Arthur Dixon.

Note 1. Fiction films—or documentaries—that dramatize the experience of postmemory are common in the Latin American cinema of recent decades. In Peruvian film, releases like La teta asustada [The Milk of Sorrow] (2009) by Claudia Llosa and Paraíso [Paradise] (2010) by Héctor Gálvez are examples of this style of representation, practiced above all by filmmakers born after the 1970s.

Works Cited Asociación Pro Derechos Humanos (APRODEH), 2018. Caso Umasi Raccaya [online]. Available at: [Accessed 8 April 2019]. Bagua, 2009. [film] Directed by Mauricio Godoy. Perú: Mauricio Godoy. Beugnet, M., 2017. L’attrait du flou. Paris: Yellow Now. Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da [Once Upon a Time in Anatolia], 2011. [film] Directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Turkey: Zeynofilm, Production 2006, 1000 Volt, Turkish Radio & Television (TRT), Imaj, Fida Film, and NBC Film. Bustamante, E. and Luna Victoria, J., 2017. Las miradas múltiples: el cine regional peruano. Lima: Universidad de Lima. Comisión de la Verdad y la Reconciliación (CVR), 2003. Informe final [PDF]. Available at: [Accessed 10 April 2019].

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Comolli, J.-L. and Sorrel, V., 2015. Cinéma, mode d’emploi: de l’argentique au numérique. París: Verdier. Hirsch, M., 1997. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. La espera. Historias del Baguazo, 2014. [film] Directed by Fernando Vílchez. Perú: Bergman Was Right Films, and Asociación otra mirada. La mujer sin cabeza [The Headless Woman], 2008. [film] Directed by Lucrecia Martel. Argentina: Aquafilms, El deseo, R&C Produzioni, Slot Machine, and Teodora Film. La teta asustada [The Milk of Sorrow], 2009. [film] Directed by Claudia Llosa. Perú-Spain: Generalitat de Catalunya—Institut Català de les Indústries Culturals (ICIC), Ministerio de cultura, Oberón cinematográfica, Televisió de Catalunya (TV3), Televisión española (TVE), Vela producciones, and Wanda visión S.A. Madeinusa, 2006. [film] Directed by Claudia Llosa. Perú-Spain: Oberón cinematográfica, Vela producciones, and Wanda visión S.A. Ochonicky, A., 2018. The Spectral Present: Landscapes of Absence in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia and The Headless Woman. Screening the Past [e-Journal] (43). Available at: [Accessed 8 April 2019]. Paraíso [Paradise], 2010. [film] Directed by Héctor Gálvez. Perú: Chullachaki producciones, Neue Cameo Film, and Oasis producciones cinematográficas S.L. Pink, S. and Leder Mackley, K., 2014. Reenactment Methodologies for Everyday Life Research: Art Therapy Insights for Video Ethnography. Visual Studies, 29(2), pp. 146–154. Raccaya Umasi, 2011. [film] Directed by Vicente Cueto. Perú: DOCUPERU. Reminiscencia 2 [Reminiscence 2], 2018. [film] Directed by Piero Parra Solar. Perú: Amaru producciones Ayacucho. Saona, M., 2017. Los mecanismos de la memoria: recordar la violencia en el Perú. Lima: Fondo Editorial Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Solo te puedo mostrar el color [I Can Only Show You the Color], 2014. [film] Directed by Fernando Vílchez. Perú: Bergman Was Right Films. Taccetta, N. and Véliz, M., 2014. El dispositivo cinematográfico y la redistribución de lo visible: entrevista con Jean-Louis Comolli. Cine documental [e-journal], 9, pp. 118–133. Available through: [Accessed 19 April 2019]. Taylor, D., 2012. Performance. Buenos Aires: Asunto impreso. Umberto D, 1952. [film] Directed by Vittorio de Sica. Italy: Rizzoli Film, Produzione Films Vittorio de Sica, and Amato Film.

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Vílchez, F., 2014. El país que se quedó en la Curva del Diablo. Ojo público [online]. Available at: [Accessed 20 April 2019]. Wakcha, 2017. [film] Directed by Pierre G. Llanos. Perú: Taller de cine 2017–1. Universidad de Lima. Weinrichter, A., 2015. Archivo performativo: orden y caos en el documental de archivo. In: M. Álvarez, H. Hatzmann, I. Sánchez Alarcón, eds. 2015. No se está quieto: nuevas formas documentales en el audiovisual hispánico. [Kindle] Madrid: Iberoamericana, Vervoert. Available at: [Accessed 20 April 2019].

CHAPTER 12

The Political Blockages of Peruvian Memory Cinema Alexandra Hibbett

The idea of duty-memory (Salazar Borja 2015) in post-conflict Peru is a key way in which art and culture is invested with a political role.1 Creators, distributors and commentators often emphasize the importance of contemporary Peruvian works of art and culture in terms of contributing to a collective memory process seen as vital in preventing the repetition of violence. But to what extent does this discourse adequately describe the way these productions work at a social level? This chapter considers how twenty-first-century Peruvian duty-memory cinema is working as political art. I argue that these films face many challenges in their attempt to address the problems of Peruvian post-conflict society. Historical, social and material blockages both affect the reality the films represent and condition the films’ own making, such that they are obliged to deal with them not only at the level of representation, but also at the level of production and circulation.

A. Hibbett (B) Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Lima, Peru e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 C. Vich and S. Barrow (eds.), Peruvian Cinema of the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52512-5_12

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Many films have been produced in Peru, or co-produced with other countries, on the period of political violence since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR) (2001–2003) was established. As Víctor Vich (2015) and Margarita Saona (2014) have studied, this commission provided both framework and motivation for the visual arts to engage with the topic, by disseminating the idea of duty-memory through its photography exhibition Yuyanapaq (2003–present) and the broadcasting of victims’ testimonies on national television and radio (2002). I will here focus on films inspired and framed by duty-memory discourse that (with one exception) are fictions and have enjoyed a measure of visibility in Peru in terms of audience numbers and discussion in the public sphere: Fabrizio Aguilar’s Paloma de papel [Paper Dove] (2003), Claudia Llosa’s La teta asustada [The Milk of Sorrow] (2009), Salvador del Solar’s Magallanes (2015), Jorge Carmona’s Av. Larco: la película [Larco Avenue: The Film] (2017), Eduardo Mendoza’s La hora final [The Final Hour] (2017), Palito Ortega Matute’s La casa rosada [The Pink House] (2017) and Judith Vélez’s documentary Volver a ver [Seeing Again] (2018).2 The creators of these productions were inspired and enabled by the politicization of memory in Peru during the century. The case of Av. Larco is perhaps the most explicit, ending with a written statement reading “Dedicated to all the Peruvians who unfairly died in that era. An era which we hope will never be repeated. For a free, just and united Peru.” However, these film-makers do not explicitly label their work as political art, or describe their main motivation as being to contribute to a memory process. Del Solar, for example, has emphasized that his principal interest in Magallanes was to tell the characters’ story, not make “a propagandist film” (Cisneros 2015). Nonetheless, their statements about their inspirations show how they have been heavily inflected by the idea of duty-memory. Del Solar has stated that his film is about an “unresolved issue also between all Peruvians. It’s a story of individuals, deeply personal and, yet, inevitably political” (Nodal 2016). Similarly, Claudia Llosa, while denying that La teta asustada is straightforwardly political, sees it as a film “of understanding, of reconciliation, of forgiveness” (Ortiz 2009) that “puts the topic on the debate table” (Caballero 2010). Explicit political discourses do not come into play, but creators draw on the notion of duty-memory to describe their works as contributing, via art, to a postconflict process of social healing, opening dialogue, overcoming conflict and national integration.

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It is virtually impossible to broach the topic of political violence in Peru while steering clear of politics. To support the CVR’s search for justice and reconciliation places you on one side of a deep political divide, the other side being headed by people with vested interests in impunity and the continuation of the status quo, such as supporters of the Fujimori regime.3 Moreover, as Paulo Drinot (2009, pp. 11–13) has studied, in Peru the hegemonic narrative of the period is what has been called, in academia, salvation-memory, which upholds the violence was caused solely by “terrorists” who were defeated by the “heroic” State, and thus that there is little need to remember.4 Given such polarization, the denial of political intent by these film-makers is convergent with their attempt to, in Del Solar’s words, “lower the public’s guard; to deactivate their position regarding … political violence and connect them on a human level” (Nodal 2016). Irrespective of directors’ intentions, in all cases, the films’ receptions in Peru are tied up with post-conflict tensions: they receive praise or criticism for their duty-memory focus, depending on the persuasion of the reviewer. None of the films would have been possible were it not for the materials the CVR provided for representing the period and the public debate it opened on the issue. For example, Volver a ver works largely with photographs made famous by the Yuyanapaq exhibition. Moreover, duty-memory discourse has informed decisions about film-funding; for instance, La hora final won national funding for “facing the wounds of the country’s recent past, contributing to a process of reconciliation and healing of wounds” (Ministerio 2016). Memory-discourse also provided a way to market the films as more than entertainment: the release of Mendoza’s film, about the capture of Shining Path leader, was timed to coincide with its twenty-fifth anniversary, suggesting a patriotic celebration, and Volver a ver’s social media tagline—“This time don’t forget us”—appealed to a sense of moral duty towards victims. What I consider the first blockage facing these films is the opposition between considering film as art (as related to beauty, significance and autonomy) and as industry (as related to financial interests). There is a tension between working as art and working as industrial product; indeed, cinema has always challenged any simplistic opposition between these terms. To different degrees, the films considered here were all created following aesthetic intentions: they attempt, via special strategies of representation, to capture and express dimensions of human existence that would otherwise be lost or ignored. However, these film-makers

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have needed to balance their artistic inclinations with the material realities of film production and the desire that their films appeal to broad audiences. Film is crisscrossed by the economic demands of a transnational production circuit that prioritizes mass audiences who do not seek art so much as entertainment. Art films, while successful in the international funding and festival circuit, and in encouraging moral reflection in elite, artistically-educated groups, struggle to connect to large audiences. In Peru, the contradiction between prioritizing artistic or mediatic criteria intersects with that between duty and salvation-memory, which affects these films’ production and circulation. On the one hand, artistic intentions converge with duty-memory discourse insofar as art is seen to capture that which “should be remembered.” Global art cinema employs varying degrees of neorealism and modernism (Galt and Schoonover 2010, p. 15), and both these styles are useful to duty-memory aims. For example, La teta… connects to neorealism’s commitment to show what is usually hidden from our social gaze, while also diverging from conventional narrative structures so as to express feelings and experiences which could be considered marginal to the plot. The film brings to light that which we “should remember,” for instance the “forgotten” suffering of the victims; and expresses subtle post-conflict processes such as the agonizing duration of trauma and the healing value of traditional song. These powerful aesthetic resources run counter to those made popular by the mainstream international cinema industry, while the latter may sacrifice nuance and complexity in their treatment of post-conflict themes (Av. Larco is a clear case of this, as I will return to below). On the other hand, artistic duty-memory films’ access to audiences is further complicated in Peru because the public has tended to be indifferent or even averse to “remembering” political violence, due to the influence of salvationmemory. Consequently, in practice, each film is obliged to balance the pros and cons of being an art film (La teta…), “commercial” (Av. Larco, La hora final ), or attempt to function at both levels (Magallanes ). Film has greater potential than many other forms of culture to reach wide audiences, and indeed, in Peru, it has recently been found that, in the absence of adequate education on the topic, two films have provided young people with a mental image of the period of political violence: Francisco Lombardi’s La boca del lobo and Aguilar’s Paloma de papel (Uccelli et al. 2017, p. 163). Distribution is, however, a big concern even for the most industry-orientated Peruvian films, and more now than ever.

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At the time of the release of these two films (1988 and 2003, respectively), there was more space on screens for Peruvian films, and there were fewer national releases overall (Rivas 2019).5 Now, Peruvian films struggle to make it onto commercial screens; they are not guaranteed a set exhibition time; and, as blockbuster Hollywood releases take up most slots during the July holidays, they often appear simultaneously between September and November (Bedoya 2018), competing amongst themselves for the same small audience. This affects non-commercial dutymemory Peruvian films greatly; neither memory-discourse nor artistic considerations bring much to bear on the decisions of the international corporations that own most cinemas. Limited numbers of screens are allocated at the most inconvenient times for non-commercial Peruvian films, especially documentaries: Volver a ver was seen by scarcely 400 people in its first weekend on its two screens (Delgado 2019). And, of course, the publicity given to national productions is no competition to the vastly funded advertising of Hollywood outputs. La hora final and Av. Larco prioritized reaching larger, urban audiences by using commercial distribution strategies and preferring popular genres to “art film” aesthetics: the thriller in the first case, and the musical comedy in the second. This allowed them to reach relatively wide audiences for Peruvian productions: 775 thousand for Av. Larco (El Comercio 2017), and 225 thousand for La hora final (Villegas 2017).6 Av. Larco was produced by Tondero, a Peruvian company which has a distribution deal with the main chain cinemas and has produced most of the biggest box-office hits in the history of Peruvian cinema. La hora final won public funding for distribution, and overcame popular aversion to dutymemory productions by strategically focusing its narrative on a “heroic” tale of the capture of Shining Path leader Guzmán, timing its premiere for the twenty-fifth anniversary of this capture, and using social networks extensively. It also combined its hashtag #LaHoraFinal with one that echoed hegemonic, salvation-memory and that was going viral at the time due to this anniversary: #TerrorismoNuncaMás [#TerrorismNeverAgain]. Broadly speaking, these films provide narratives that are critical towards the role of the State during the period, and work to support the CVR’s memory-agenda by inviting audiences to engage with characters at a human, emotional level. However, they sacrifice historical complexity alongside aesthetic nuance in their representation of the past in order to fit in with wider audience expectations in terms of entertainment and, as I will return to below, salvation-memory, especially regarding the depiction

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of Shining Path. This is certainly the case of Av. Larco, the most-seen duty-memory film: there is a discernible trade-off between complexity in duty-memory and artistic terms, and access to wide audiences in the grasp of cultural industries and salvation-memory. Nonetheless, it received favourable reviews for its depiction of the period of political violence (Beteta 2017; Fowks 2017). Magallanes attempts to strike a balance between working as art and as industry. Produced by Tondero, with moments of neorealism slipped into a fast-paced, public-pleasing drama-thriller, it has been celebrated in dutymemory academic and critical circles for its fairly complex representation of post-conflict Peru, with an empowered victim and a humanized yet unambiguously condemnable perpetrator (Almenara 2018; Vich 2019; Hibbett 2019). This was especially thanks to the intervention of Magaly Solier, the Andean actor, in the production with her idea of giving the defiant monologue towards the end of the film in un-subtitled Quechua (Del Solar 2018). The tirade at once humbles the characters in the scene and the Lima-elite-audience, for both are unable to understand her. A new, empowered Andean character thus resulted from integrating the creativity of an Andean actor—Magaly Solier—and had the effect of unsettling Limeño viewers. Magallanes , however, was viewed by smaller audiences in cinemas than more market-oriented duty-memory films, with 89 thousand tickets sold (Gestión 2016).7 The case of La teta asustada is exceptional, from the perspective of the trade-off between artistic and commercial goals, for it achieved nearly 250 thousand ticket sales despite being a slow paced, artistic piece. According to Galt and Schoonover, sometimes “the very international reception of art cinema becomes proof of its national importance” (2010, p. 7). This is what happened in the case of Llosa’s film, whose national success is largely attributable to having won the Berlin Film Festival Golden Bear for best film and to its subsequent nomination for the 2010 Oscars. Beyond the accolades, it also owes its success, as Ricardo Bedoya (2016) has argued, to the moving and politically significant initiative taken, again, by the actor Solier to sing in Quechua in the awards ceremony in Berlin, a moment then portrayed by the press in Peru as a national triumph. Solier’s impact on Peruvian duty-memory film’s successes is noteworthy: she also translated the Quechua lines of La teta…’s script from Spanish, and set the lyrics of the songs to music, taking inspiration from traditional Andean song (Lambright 2015, p. 72). It is not often that an Andean

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person, from a family victimized during political violence,8 can participate in the production and circulation of widely seen films. Indeed, a second blockage facing duty memory films in their attempt to have a positive social impact, results from their use of modes of production and circulation that participate in power-inequalities between the Andes and Lima. Given that Peru is a pluricultural and plurilingual nation, and that political violence in Peru disproportionately affected poor, rural, Quechua speaking Andean people, it is problematic that even dutymemory films are conditioned by these unequal power relations. They are so, firstly, in that the audiences for these types of films are predominantly made up of privileged social sectors. There is a well-established tendency for independent, art and memory films to be screened and viewed almost solely in Lima and mostly in cinemas in rich areas, such as at CinePlanet Alcázar, at the border of Miraflores and San Isidro (Acuña 2019; Del Solar 2018). There has been no sustained government effort to create an inclusive, nation-wide cinema culture; there are many districts in Peru where there is no longer any cinema at all. Therefore, those social sectors most directly and intensely impacted by the violence are probably also those least likely to access these films. In such circumstances, producers are obliged to make efforts, with their own resources, to organize screenings in alternative spaces and outside Lima. Secondly, as Sarah Barrow (2018) and Deborah Shaw (2015) have discussed, the international funding accessed by today’s generation of Peruvian film-makers exerts imperialistic pressure to produce exotic depictions of the nation to satisfy the global film festival circuit. This applies especially to the more artistic duty-memory films. Art cinema has “international address, distribution, audience and aesthetic language” because of its inherent links to a series of “international aesthetic, critical and industrial institutions” (Galt and Schoonover 2010, p. 20). Audiences and critics are led to see art films as opening “a unique communicative space across historical contexts,” that is, ahistorically (Galt and Schoonover 2010, p. 14), which complicates claims that they have a positive impact on local social processes. In Peru, this problem harks back to the indigenistas , whose work, according to Antonio Cornejo Polar (1980), was structured by the separation of the populations they represented (Andean, rural) from its producers and audiences (coastal, urban), such that indigenista creations speak more of the colonial divisions in Peruvian society than of the reality of Andean populations or the coming together of a nation.9

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Today, this overlaps with a third problem, specific to duty-memory production: that of producing a counterproductive image of the (rural, Andean) victim, that would detract from their agency and from the complexity of their historical experience by depicting them as pure, innocent and passive. Several Lima-based duty-memory cultural productions in Peru fall into a simplistic, colonial and gendered schema whereby audiences are induced to feeling a charitable empathy and “manly” responsibility towards a victim presented on the basis of “her” otherness and suffering (Hibbett 2019). In film, the risk of producing such an image of the victim is redoubled due to the international film-financing circuits’ pressure to produce exoticizing images of otherness. Paloma de papel exemplifies this risk. It was one of the first films to directly represent Shining Path after the Fujimori regime’s curtailing of freedom of expression (Barrow 2018, p. 176). However, as Anne Lambright (2015) has argued, its rosy depiction of an Andean village, predominance of child-characters, simplistic narrative of how the village was affected by the violence, as well as lack of specifically Andean cultural referents and the fact that all the dialogues are in Spanish, mean that its duty-memory orientation overlaps with established, colonially-inflected representations of the Andes. This romanticized, exoticized and infantilized image of Andean people is functional, at a superficial level, to a duty-memory setup whereby non-Andean, indifferent audiences are invited to feel empathy towards the sufferings of marginalized people. However, it also contributes to maintaining deep social divisions by perpetuating stereotypes, naturalizing power structures and covering up the challenge of truly engaging with cultural difference. While Solier’s un-subtitled Quechua tirade at the end of Magallanes shows one way in which a duty-memory film can interrupt this exoticization of otherness and promote, instead, recognition that Andean culture has been historically oppressed, La teta… exemplifies another way in which Peruvian duty-memory films come up against this blockage despite their intentions. The use of Quechua at its awards ceremony in Berlin made many non-Quechua Peruvians feel proud of a culture they might previously have discriminated against. The film itself also empowers the language at the level of representation: forty per cent of its dialogues are in Quechua (Lambright 2015, p. 26), with particularly striking effect in the opening sequence of a melancholic song by the dying mother of the main character. According to Anne Lambright (2015) and Juan José Beteta (2009), La teta… represents Andean people

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in such a way as to legitimize them as agents of a complex modernity. However, for Maria Chiara D’Argenio (2013), Cynthia Vich (2014) and Deborah Shaw (2015), it sells a problematic image of otherness to international audiences. D’Argenio argues that by combining “pre-existing models of representation of the Andean subjects developed by Indigenista artists” with “anthropological sources, kitsch and magical realism,” the film produces “an unproblematic and accessible way of thinking of and symbolically representing ‘otherness’” (2013, p. 20); Vich sees this as an aestheticization and commodification of the Andean migrant in order to provide an attractive product in the market of global images; and for Shaw, La teta… caters to “the entertainment of the festival and urban art cinema audiences” interested in “primitivism” (2015, p. 94). Regarding the use of Quechua in light of these ideas, and comparing it to Magallanes , it is significant that the song at the beginning is beautiful and melancholic, and that the lyrics are provided in Spanish subtitles: it is aestheticized and made comprehensible for the taste of non-Quechua speaking, art film audiences. More recently, Volver a ver has tackled this difficulty. It follows three photographers returning to Andean villages to show the people they had photographed, twenty or thirty years earlier during the political violence, the images that had been taken of them. Several of the photographs had been included in the CVR’s exhibition Yuyanapaq, but while the latter emphasized a figure of the victim as vulnerable and suffering (Poole and Rojas 2011), this documentary, as its director has emphasized (Zanelli 2019) and as Andrea Cabel (2019) has noted, underlines victims’ agency in various ways. In recontextualizing the photos, it also illuminates Limeño audiences as to the underrepresented complexities of the period and the challenges of post-conflict Peru. Nevertheless, the film is still faced with the risk of imposing hierarchical relations of production and circulation, as well as invasive camera use, on historically exoticized, oppressed and traumatized people who are being sought out and shown painful images, in front of a camera, for international audiences. Volver a ver makes efforts to mitigate this risk. For example, in one scene when a Quechua woman is giving her testimony and she approaches the most painful part of it, the image fades and is replaced by a medium shot of a sunrise in the Andean countryside. Most of the screen is taken up by a cloudy, orange sky, with plants silhouetted in the foreground and a line of mountains in the background. Over this image we hear her recount a brutal and traumatic event; because her voice trembles and her

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breathing becomes heavy, we know that she is crying, but we do not see her. When we cut back to her, she is composed. This montage suggests a respectful distance, avoiding exposing her at her most vulnerable. However, at the same time the documentary, in never overtly showing whether or how Andean people were allowed to participate in the production, represents them in a way that naturalizes power structures. The photographers are depicted as those in command, directing and aiming their cameras at locals. At no point are we privy to how the film-makers initially approached them, or whether they were allowed to negotiate the terms of their participation: we see no discussions, tensions, questions or misunderstandings that might have taken place. This suggests that their openness to the camera can be taken for granted, which fails to challenge the gaze of Limeño and international viewers. Volver a ver thus participates in the power dynamics ever present in Peruvian society, which often have to do with who has the power to choose what to represent, for whom and how. In light of this, logically, we should turn to films about political violence made outside Lima, where victim populations represent themselves. This brings me to the fourth difficulty affecting Peruvian dutymemory films: the adversity facing non-Limeño film productions, for while production is significant, one of the most substantive challenges these films face is finding an audience. On the one hand, as Jeffrey Middents has shown, the canon of Peruvian film was created on the basis of foreign and especially European and US aesthetic influences, rather than taking inspiration from Andean or other original cultures (2009, pp. 11, 170). This means that it is difficult for Andean productions, if they veer away from this canon, to become popular with national Peruvian funders, circulators and audiences. On the other hand, not only funding but, according to Palito Ortega Matute, practical know-how is also in short supply (Idealterna 2007). The lack of state support for a film production culture in the Andes is joined by limited circulation. While alternative, independent circuits exist both in Lima and in other regions thanks to diligent self-management, productions from outside Lima face an even bigger impasse than productions from the capital when attempting to be displayed across wider, commercial circuits. However, there is one recent exception: Ortega Matute’s La casa rosada. Over a decade, Ortega Matute wrote and produced this film in Ayacucho, the city where he was from and the region most affected by

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the violence. Insufficient state funds were complemented with help volunteered by friends, family and local businesses, motivated by admiration for Ortega Matute and a feeling of pride of having their local community on the cinema screen (Acuña 2019; Ulfe 2020).10 He was driven, more than by artistic intentions, by the will to take his own experience as a victim, and the experience of his region, to wider audiences: the film has a testimonial as well as a pedagogical dimension (Acuña 2019; Hibbett 2018; Sotelo 2017). Given its site and relations of production, its stance towards the blockages analyzed so far is different. It is neither a niche, artistic product, nor a blockbuster traversed by the expectations of mass audiences. Rather, it speaks as a victim would in a testimony, aiming at broad audiences but without sacrificing brutal truths or exoticizing Peru for an international viewer. It does not rely on hierarchical Lima-Andean social relations of production behind the cameras, speaking from an Andean position to both local and distant audiences. La casa rosada is therefore a sign that there are different ways in which Peruvian duty-memory cinema can make progress; however, as a regional production in the absence of adequate State support, only chance circumstances allowed it to gain a measure of visibility in Peru. The news of its director’s death coincided with the release date, and a defamatory tweet by a famous sympathizer of the Fujimori regime accused him of glorifying terrorism and urged people not to see it. The tweet went viral and backfired: La casa rosada received considerable free publicity, masses of Fujimori’s opposers rushing to see it. Despite having been allocated very few slots, it was on screens for seven weeks and reached 25 thousand people (Rojas 2018). It was later broadcast on national television. The difficulties facing Peruvian and especially non-Limeño films led film-makers to campaign for a better film law to support national productions. Recently, as discussed in this volume’s introduction, the debate over the bill for a new law was mired by (ultimately failed) attempts by politicians on the side of salvation-memory to include a clause that would prevent any films considered to be “glorifying terrorism” from receiving state funds. They were alluding to the law against “glorification of terrorism,” which threatens any cultural producer interpreted to be justifying terror with 15 years’ imprisonment. This indicates a fifth blockage facing Peruvian duty-memory films: how to represent political violence given the hegemony of salvation-memory. The Fujimori regime (1990–2000) inaugurated terruqueo, a Peruvian neologism derivative of “terrorist,” consisting in accusing people of being terrorists. While

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Shining Path’s own propaganda tactics constructed them as a terrifying yet invisible presence, the Fujimori regime used terruqueo to create fear in the population, legitimize its own authoritarianism and dissuade opposition (Burt 2014).11 The practice is still systematic in right-wing political circles and in the media, shaping the depiction of political processes in the press and influencing political views, even in younger generations. This, and the law against the glorification of terrorism, provide a tool to discourage cultural representations critical of the state’s role during the period of violence (Jave et al. 2014, p. 182; Milton 2018, pp. 181–184). Due to the phenomenon of terruqueo, representing the Shining Path has become particularly challenging. Salvation-memory blames the group exclusively for the violence,12 dehumanizing its members and portraying them as external to Peruvian society. To represent them in a way that interrupts hegemonic salvation-memory runs counter to the films’ need to please national funders, avoid accusations of “glorification” and attract large audiences who may reject such a representation.13 This is probably why they are often simply not represented at all in duty-memory productions that focus instead on the figures of victim and rememberer (Hibbett 2019)—the case of La teta…, Magallanes and Volver a ver—or, when they are, that they appear one-dimensionally, as fanatic individuals. Av. Larco is paradigmatic in this regard. The light musical comedy explores social tensions and divisions and denounces Shining Path violence as well as police corruption and abuse. Being in a rock band allows the main characters—upper class university students—to overcome their social prejudices and oppose violence and authoritarianism. It involves no Shining Path characters until nearly the end: when the band is playing in a stadium, two Shining Path militants throw an explosive onto the stage and start shooting. They kill the sweetest, most innocent character and, in suicidal fervour, keep shooting until they themselves are shot—something Shining Path would most probably not have done and that is more suggestive of jihadi tactics. The film ends with melodramatic scenes of the young man’s agony and of grief after his death; there is even a sequence of all the characters (except the militants), upper and lower classes, coming together in a march, holding a photograph of their friend in the way that victims’ organizations have often marched carrying photos of their disappeared. By contrast, the militant’s deaths are barely on the screen for a second. The closing written statement, cited above, laments all “unfair” deaths, implying that some deaths were fair.

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This sequence elicits strong and crude emotions against Shining Path; excluding them from any possible mourning allows for unity over the divides of race, class and sexual orientation, and hence for a feel-good ending. The price of this is maintaining emotions of fear and hatred towards them, misleading audiences as to their historical specificity, and promoting simplistic binaries of innocence and evil. That this is the most highly seen, commercial duty-memory film while also being the one which most negatively and simplistically represents Shining Path is not a coincidence; this concession to salvation-memory was certainly a factor for its success, not only with audiences but with funding and circulation. By contrast, La casa rosada does not heed the threat of terruqueo in its portrayal of Shining Path: although secondary characters, Shining Path appear not as monstrous others, but as young, brave political militants, convinced that violence was the only way forward in a place neglected by the state. Meanwhile, La hora final attempted to represent Shining Path in a complex way while still appealing to mass audiences. Testing the limits of its audience’s tolerance, it requires us to empathize with a peculiar heroine: a victim of the conflict, a policewoman and also the elder sister of a Shining Path militant. She is torn between conflicting duties as police officer and as sister: the militant is humanized, and the victim is not presented as essentially distant from the perpetrator. In this way, La hora final slips in a significant transgression of salvation-memory. However, it does not go far with this development; as Armando Cruz (2017) has highlighted, it lacks “any seriousness with regard to the historical and social forces that gave rise to Shining Path,” giving very little opportunity to understand why someone could have chosen to join the group. Moreover, its ending also surrenders to this blockage, as if its slightly more complex, humanizing representation of Shining Path was unsustainable and needed to be simplified. In a shocking scene that was, indeed, a late addition to the script,14 the Shining Path militant sets off a car bomb, killing several innocent passers-by. The scene stuns the audience into a rejection of Shining Path, cancels the empathy previous scenes made possible, and offers resolution as his sister finally decides to arrest him. Despite this, it received a damning review from a popular rightwing tabloid, accusing it of being too complacent towards Shining Path (Carnero 2018). To conclude, Peruvian duty-memory films face serious difficulties, simultaneously at the levels of representation, production and circulation, in achieving their aims: that of the opposition between industry

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and art; that of representing Andean people from within social relations that oppress them; that of representing victims without undermining their agency; that of producing films outside Lima in a highly centralized industry and that of tackling the topic of political violence in a context of terruqueo. These are not problems of the films’ making, but rather problems in which they participate, conditions of their production: Peruvian duty-memory films, despite the intentions of their makers and the care they have taken in relation to all these difficulties, are to a great extent determined by the cinema industry’s and post-conflict Peruvian society’s blockages and sticking points. However, the films examined also show that through innovations such as adapting popular genres to duty-memory projects (Magallanes and La hora final ), incorporating the creative ideas of a Quechua speaking actor (Magallanes and La teta…), mobilizing social relations of production based outside Lima (La casa rosada), or using montage in subtle ways (Volver a ver), producers can and do engage productively with these contextual challenges. Acknowledgements This research was enabled by the support of the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. I also thank Renzo Rivas, Arianna Giusti, Alexis Hernando and Oscar Rosales for their assistance.

Notes 1. Peru went through a period of political violence between 1980 and 2000, sparked by the uprising of Shining Path. 2. All translations from Spanish, including film titles that do not have an official translation, are my own. 3. Cynthia Milton (2018) has shown how a small but powerful group of ex-military men are highly influential in opposing duty-memory. 4. The only engagement of the military with memory-discourse is to oppose pro-human rights processes by using some of its tropes (Milton 2018). In this vein, an exception within film production on the violence is Vidas paralelas (2008), produced by the Armed Forces and a university founded by military personnel: it insists on the need to remember, but suggests we should remember the Armed Forces as heroic (Milton 2018, p. 131). 5. This partly explains why Paloma de papel was seen by approximately 248 thousand people (Gestión 2016). 6. Av. Larco was available on YouTube (66 thousand views by 2018), and La hora final is currently on both Youtube (92 thousand views by the same year) and Netflix, increasing audience numbers significantly.

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7. While it was broadcast once on national television, it is not available on YouTube, in contrast to other films here discussed (see Note 6). 8. Solier is from Ayacucho, and lost an uncle during the period (Sifuentes 2009). 9. D’Argenio (2013) notes this structure in Llosa’s films. 10. It was awarded a state prize for development in 2009, but it did not win state funds for distribution, losing to La hora final (Acuña 2019). 11. During political violence, to accuse someone of being a terrorist was often a tool to legitimize brutal modes of state repression against rural, indigenous poor populations, as well as human rights activists, NGOs, or people identified as left-wing or progressive (Aguirre 2011). 12. The CVR attributes 54% of lives lost to Shining Path and 35% to the state’s security forces. 13. In addition to regular audiences rejecting these films for this reason, related difficulties have been encountered at the production and exhibition levels: for example, when Del Solar requested the ice-cream company, D’Onofrio, to facilitate an ice-cream vendor for a scene in Magallanes , they refused, because in the scene an old man with dementia falsely accused the vendor of being a terrorist (Del Solar 2018). Similarly, La hora final ’s premiere’s original location cancelled the screening due to fears over its content (Mendoza 2017). 14. I had access to the script in 2016, in which this scene was absent.

Works Cited Acuña, N., 2019. Personal interview (Personal communication, 29 April 2019). Aguirre, C., 2011. Terruco de m… insulto y estigma en la guerra sucia peruana. Histórica, 35(1), pp. 103–139. Almenara, E., 2018. Trauma y memoria en La sangre de la aurora de Claudia Salazar y Magallanes de Salvador del Solar. Letras femeninas, 43(2), pp. 55– 67. Av. Larco [Larco Avenue], 2018. [film] Directed by Jorge Carmona. Peru: Tondero Films. Barrow, S., 2018. Contemporary Peruvian Cinema: History, Identity and Violence on Screen. London and New York: I. B. Tauris. Bedoya, R., 2016. Dos “performances” de Magaly Solier: construyendo una imagen cultural. Dossier: Mirar los Andes 26 (July–December), pp. 71–84. Bedoya, R., 2018. Cine peruano: el año que se fue. Ideele 277 [online]. Available at: [Accessed 2 January 2020].

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Beteta, J. J., 2009. La teta asustada de Claudia Llosa. Cinencuentro, 17 March [online]. Available at: [Accessed 18 June 2019]. Beteta, J. J., 2017. Av. Larco, la película contribuye a la temática de la guerra interna peruana en el cine. Cinencuentro.com [online] 23 May. Available at: [Accessed 12 December 2019]. Burt, J., 2014. The Paradoxes of Accountability: Transitional Justice in Peru. In: S. J. Stern and S. Straus, eds. 2014. The Human Rights Paradox: Universality and its Discontents (Critical Human Rights Series). Madison, London: University of Wisconsin Press. pp. 148–174. Caballero, J., 2010. La teta asustada, relato para encarar nuestros traumas: Claudia Llosa. Periódico La Jornada [online] 14 January. Available at: [Accessed 19 February 2018]. Cabel, A., 2019. La necesidad de Volver a ver. Hawansuyo [online] 18 November. Available at: [Accessed 3 January 2020]. Carnero, L., 2018. La hora final: La captura de Abimael Guzmán. Trome [online] 27 September. Available at: [Accessed 28 February 2019]. Cisneros, R., 2015. Magallanes, de Salvador del Solar. No somos libres. Programa Ibermedia [online] 15 September. Available at: [Accessed 22 January 2018]. Comisión de la Verdad y la Reconciliación (CVR), 2003. Informe final [PDF]. Available at: [Accessed 27 October 2017]. Cornejo Polar, A., 1980. Literatura y sociedad en el Perú: la novela indigenista. Lima: Losantay. Cruz, A., 2017. The Last Hour (La Hora Final) and Peru’s ongoing glorification of its military and intelligence forces. World Socialist Web Site [online] 13 November. Available at: [Accessed 18 June 2019]. D’Argenio, M. C., 2013. A Contemporary Andean Type: The Representation of the Indigenous World in Claudia Llosa’s Films. Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, 8(1), pp. 20–42. Del Solar, S., 2018. Personal interview (Personal communication, 27 March 2018). Delgado, M., 2019. Días de mala racha para el cine peruano. Wayka [online] 18 November. Available at: [Accessed 7 December 2019].

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Drinot, P., 2009. For Whom the Eye Cries: Memory, Monumentality, and the Ontologies of Violence in Peru. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies: Travesia, 18(1), pp. 15–32. El Comercio, 2017. Estas son las películas peruanas más vistas en lo que va del 2017. El Comercio [online] 23 October. Available at: [Accessed 10 December 2019]. Fowks, J., 2017. Av. Larco, un musical sobre la violencia más reciente en Perú. El País [online] 7 April. Available at: [Accessed 5 December 2019]. Galt, R. and Schoonover, K., 2010. Introduction: The Impurity of Art Cinema. In: R. Galt and K. Schoonover, eds. Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 3–27. Gestión, 2016. Salvador del Solar y Magallanes, su película más laureada afuera pero menos taquillera en Perú. Gestión [online] 5 December. Available at: [Accessed 11 November 2019]. Hibbett, A., 2018. La verdad de La Casa Rosada. Disonancia. Portal de debate y crítica social [online] 19 May. Available at: [Accessed 18 June 2019]. Hibbett, A., 2019. La problemática de la víctima en la memoria cultural peruana. In: L. De Vivanco and M. T. Johansson, eds. 2019. Pasados contemporáneos: acercamientos interdisciplinarios a los derechos humanos y las memorias en Perú y América Latina. Madrid and Frankfurt: Iberoamericana and Vervuert. pp. 149–165. Idealterna Perú, 2007. Entrevista a Palito Ortega [Online video]. Available at: [Accessed 8 December 2019]. Jave, I., Cépeda, M., and Uchuypoma, D., 2014. Entre el estigma y el silencio: memoria de la violencia entre estudiantes de la UNMSM y la UNSCH . Lima: IDEHPUCP/Fundación Konrad Adenauer. La casa rosada [The Pink House], 2017. [film] Directed by Palito Ortega Matute. Peru: Andina compañía cinematográfica and Peru Movie. La teta asustada [The Milk of Sorrow], 2009. [film] Directed by Claudia Llosa. Perú and Spain: Generalitat de Catalunya - Institut Català de les Indústries Culturals (ICIC), Ministerio de cultura, Oberón cinematográfica, Televisió de Catalunya (TV3), Televisión española (TVE), Vela producciones, and Wanda visión S.A. Lambright, A., 2015. Andean Truths: Transitional Justice, Ethnicity, and Cultural Production in Post-Shining Path Peru. Liverpool: Liverpool UP.

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Magallanes, 2015. [film] Directed by Salvador del Solar. Peru, Argentina, and Spain: CEPA Audiovisual, Nephilim producciones, Péndulo Films, Tondero. Mendoza, E., 2017. Personal interview (Personal communication, 6 December 2017). Middents, J., 2009. Writing National Cinema. Film Journals and Film Culture in Peru. Lebanon: Dartmouth College Press. Milton, Cynthia E., 2018. Conflicted Memory: Military Cultural Interventions and the Human Rights Era in Peru (Critical Human Rights series). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Ministerio de Cultura, 2016. Acta final del jurado. Concurso nacional de proyectos de largometraje de ficción 2016 [PDF]. Available at: [Accessed 30 December 2019]. Nodal Cultura, 2016. En el Perú llevamos años sin poder dialogar sobre lo ocurrido en los tiempos violentos: entrevista a Salvador del Solar. Nodal Cultura: noticias de América Latina y el Caribe [online] 26 February. Available at: [Accessed 22 January 2018]. Ortiz, J., 2009. Claudia Llosa: Mi nueva película va a conmocionar. Entrevista a directora de La teta asustada antes de ganar el Oso de oro de Berlín. Blog de Richard Angelo Leonardo Loayza [blog] 21 February. Available at:

[Accessed 19 February 2018]. Paloma de papel [Paper Dove], 2003. Directed by Fabrizio Aguilar. Peru: Luna llena films. Poole, D. and Rojas, I., 2011. Fotografía y memoria en el Perú de la postguerra. In: G. Cánepa Koch, ed. 2011. Imaginación visual y cultura en el Perú. Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. pp. 263–303. Rivas, Renzo. Personal communication: Email (Personal communication, 17 December 2019). Rojas Andia, K., 2018. Aun con menos películas nacionales, la cantidad de espectadores se incrementa. Gestión [online] 27 December. Available at: [Accessed 31 December 2019]. Salazar Borja, G., 2015. Sin debates no hay campo: un acercamiento a los estudios sobre memorias de violencia política en el Perú (1998–2010). In: C. Iván Degregori, T. Portugal Teillier, G. Salazar Borja, and R. Aroni Sulca, eds. 2015. No hay mañana sin ayer: batallas por la memoria y consolidación democrática en el Perú. Lima: IEP. pp. 237–301.

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Saona, M., 2014. Memory Matters in Transitional Peru. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Shaw, D., 2015. European Co-production Funds and Latin American Cinema: Processes of Othering and Bourgeois Cinephilia in Claudia Llosa’s La teta asustada. Diogenes 62(1), pp. 88–99. Sifuentes, M., 2009. Con Magaly Solier en Yuyanapaq [Online video]. Available at: [Accessed 3 January 2020]. Sotelo, A., 2017. Película de un verdadero testigo. Caretas, [online] 29 December. Available at: [Accessed 17 June 2019]. Uccelli, F., Agüero, J. C., Pease, M. A., and Portugal, T., 2017. Atravesar el silencio: memorias sobre el conflicto armado interno y su tratamiento en la escuela. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos. Ulfe, M. E., 2020. Filming Horror in Post-conflict Peru: Making and Marketing La Casa Rosada. In: C. Vich and S. Barrow, eds. 2020. Peruvian Cinema in the Twenty-First Century: Dynamic and Unstable Grounds. New York: Palgrave. pp. 105–122. Vich, C., 2014. De estetizaciones y viejos exotismos: apuntes en torno a La teta asustada de Claudia Llosa. Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, 40(80), pp. 333–344. Vich, C., 2019. De desadaptaciones y reiteradas violencias: la distancia entre la película Magallanes y la novela La pasajera. In: G. Pollarolo, ed. 2019. Nuevas aproximaciones a viejas polémicas: Cine/Literatura. Lima: PUCP. pp. 231–247. Vich, V., 2015. Poéticas del duelo: ensayos sobre arte, memoria y violencia política en el Perú. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos. Villegas, C., 2017. Cine peruano: conoce las películas nacionales más vistas de 2017. El Correo [online] 21 December. Available at: [Accessed 3 January 2020]. Volver a ver [Seeing Again], 2018. Directed by Judith Vélez. Peru: Nómade Films and La mula producciones. Zanelli, M., 2019. Volver a ver: Judith Vélez estrena documental sobre los dramáticos años de terrorismo en Ayacucho, RPP Noticias [online] 11 November. Available at: [Accessed 18 December 2019].

CHAPTER 13

Historical Memory and Cinematic Adaptations: Three Films Based on the Novels of Alonso Cueto Javier Protzel

Introduction: Literature and Film in Peru Traditionally, reading novels is not an ingrained habit among Peruvians. The reading of literary classics is limited to schools, and it does not extend beyond them. Literature stands in contrast to other fields such as the audiovisual, which, along with consumption and the economy, has grown and diversified as a result of the many significant changes experienced by the country since the end of the last century. In this context, it is not risky to claim that the diversified expansion of audiovisual entertainment has resulted in an abundance of adaptations, noting that the millennial generation—and some members of generations before it—direct their cultural habitus based on the new foundations and platforms resulting from digitalization. The current boom of television series, the latest replacement

J. Protzel (B) Universidad del Pacífico, Lima, Peru © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 C. Vich and S. Barrow (eds.), Peruvian Cinema of the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52512-5_13

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(after radio series, film serials, and soap opera) for the more than centuryold habit of reading novels, may be seen as an extreme counterpart to weak reading habits in Peru as elsewhere. This shift in narrative consumption differentiates the emerging generation from others in Peru, particularly among the urban working classes. The writing and publication of fiction texts has not diminished; on the contrary, the number of novels and short story compilations continues to increase, but their print runs are generally reduced and limited to a community of readers: in practice, a circle of the initiated. On the other hand, the desertification of film offerings in the 1980s and the second half of the 1990s marked an intergenerational rupture in the cinematographic experience. The lack of an audience brought with it a wave of commercial failures that, by 1992, reduced the number of screens in Peru to 72, versus 629 in 2018 (Tamayo and Hendrickx 2018, p. 75; Protzel 1995, p. 121). Nonetheless, since the end of the nineties, filmgoing has risen from its ashes—or rather, perhaps, from the debris of the old theaters, now demolished or converted into evangelical churches (Mejía Ticona 2007, pp. 288–333). Multiplexes—sets of six or more “screens”1 —emerged as part of a cultural reactivation spearheaded by advertising agencies and mass media. As such, the current boom in filmgoing, with more than 51 million tickets sold in 2017 (Tamayo and Hendrickx 2018, p. 105), is a relatively recent experience. Box office statistics hit new highs thanks to the large number of films released—mostly from the United States, some with millions in marketing behind them—and in spite of the competition of cable television. In line with the export-driven boom in other areas of the Peruvian economy, local audiences grew from 8 million at the turn of the century to 15 million in 2006 (Tamayo and Hendrickx 2018, p. 103). This was both a quantitative and a qualitative transformation, as new audiences were drawn from corners from which they had not been drawn before; in particular, those areas on the outskirts of Lima that were shifting away from informal housing, some of whose residents would go on to form a new middle class. Inflation control and the reopening of credit allowed for access to the consumption of symbolic goods like film, previously reserved for the top layers of society, along with their models of bodily beauty and lifestyles. Under these conditions, the film market broadened to the magnitudes mentioned above; in the twenty-first century, film seems to be the principal way that literature is now “consumed.”

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Adaptations in Peruvian Film In Peru, the majority of filmgoers attend commercial cinema products released in the multiplexes of Lima (58% of Peruvian screens are found in the capital city) and the country’s interior which has been responsible for the exponential growth of Peruvian audiences over the last decade. In 2011, in the midst of the expansion of audiences (28 million filmgoers), the participation of Peruvian cinema in total box office earnings did not even reach 1%; however by 2013 the blockbusters of Empresa Tondero Producciones alone neared 10%, and in 2016 they reached more than 11% (Universidad del Pacífico 2017, p. 24). Although Peru’s most successful director (Lombardi) has based almost all of his films on novels, Peruvian cinema has historically not been overflowing with adaptations. Only fifteen have been released in Peruvian commercial cinemas since the emergence of sound film: a negligible amount, less than 4% of the total, including several failures (Bedoya 1992, pp. 311–343; Tamayo and Hendrickx 2018, pp. 163–168). When the Decreto Ley 19327 [Law Decree 19327] (1973–1992) was operational and the Consejo Nacional de Cinematografía [National Council of Cinematography] (CONACINE) was operating under Ley 26370 (1996– 2010), only six adaptations were released, based on works by Arguedas, Congrains, Vargas Llosa, and Alegría, with variable results. However, since the beginning of this century until early 2019, there have been only three adaptations, all based on novels by Alonso Cueto (1954–) and all structured around political violence and the memory of the internal armed conflict: a dark side of reality that attracts only small Peruvian audiences and is often poorly received in the midst of general filmgoers’ preference for local blockbusters. Fiction writer Alonso Cueto has been well known since 1983, when he published his short story collection La batalla del pasado [The Battle of the Past]. Since then, he has steadily continued to publish, but his stylistic trajectory has not been linear. His first works are essentially tributes to Henry James, in terms of the finesse with which he depicts his characters and his meticulous observation, but since the start of this century he has turned toward more turbulent universes of transgressive characters and extreme situations of abjection in the Peruvian context. Moving into the territory of the political thriller, Cueto diversifies the lexicon and social origins of certain characters, placing greater importance on the dynamics and political backdrop of the action. Here, I refer to the intersection of

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individual depictions, collective memory, and historical progression that appear in the three novels by Cueto that have been brought to the screen so far in the twenty-first century: Grandes miradas [Knowing Gazes], La hora azul [The Blue Hour], and La pasajera [The Passenger]. The source material of all three of them is drawn from the traumatic traces left by the internal war between the Peruvian state and Shining Path, which are used to address the oppositions between good and evil that are represented through both the suffering and innocence of the victims, and the low moral standards of characters whose pleasure derives from their abuse of power and money. For each of the three adaptations, I will first discuss the way actions and characters are transferred from literary to filmic language, and the filmic mise-en-scene, followed by an analysis of the narrative point of view and its relationship with memory.

Mariposa negra Historically, Francisco Lombardi has been the most renowned director of Peruvian cinema, and perhaps the most studied academically (de Cárdenas 2014; Bedoya 1997). His adaptations of novels by Vargas Llosa, La ciudad y los perros [The City and the Dogs]2 and Pantaleón y las visitadoras [Captain Pantoja and the Special Service], his allusions to short stories by Julio Ramón Ribeyro3 in the film Caídos del cielo [Fallen From Heaven] (1990), as well as his interpretations of the novel No una sino muchas muertes [Not One But Many Deaths] (1957) by Enrique Congrains under the name Maruja en el infierno [Maruja in Hell] (1983), of Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky in Sin compasión [Without Compassion] (1994), and of Jaime Bayly’s novel No se lo digas a nadie [Don’t Tell Anyone] (1994) in his film of the same name (1998), attest to his vocation for creating his own depictions of morally extreme emotions and/or characters from written works. In 2003, Lombardi released Ojos que no ven [What the Eye Doesn’t See], with a script by Giovanna Pollarolo: a film that tells several parallel stories set during the pivotal time of Fujimori’s second reelection and his escape from the country. The experience of making this film made, Lombardi aware of Grandes miradas , a novel that Pollarolo had surely read before the emergence of the Mariposa negra [Black Butterfly] project, as the adaptation she developed was named. Mariposa negra is a joint Peruvian-Spanish production, which premiered in 2006 at the Montreal World Film Festival, and was shown in the United States and

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Spain as well as in Canada and Peru (Filmaffinity 2019). In Peru, it attracted 112,000 viewers, a not inconsiderable number for that year (Tamayo and Hendrickx 2018, p. 164). Furthermore, the film was nominated in Spain for the Goya Award for best foreign film, and its lead actor, Melania Urbina, won the prize for best actor at the Málaga Film Festival in 2006 (Filmaffinity 2019). Grandes miradas (the novel) and Mariposa negra (the film) are both political thrillers; they address themes of memory, power, violence, and morality in a story of sacrifice and vengeance. Gabriela “Gaby” Celaya (Melania Urbina) loses her boyfriend Guido Pazos (Darío Abad), an honest young judge, when he is murdered for challenging the misdeeds of the judicial staff that takes its orders from Vladimiro Montesinos, Fujimori’s omnipotent adviser. The long path that will lead Gaby to Montesinos, whom she plans to stab to death, is a journey that varies between the novel and the film. The two sequences chosen here makeup only small parts of the full cinematographic story. The first is Guido’s murder at the start of the film; the second comes at the end, in the headquarters of the National Intelligence Service (SIN), when Gaby’s assassination attempt fails. The death of Judge Guido Pazos is a good illustration of the divergent possibilities of audiovisual language with respect to written language. Austere and committed to Christian values, Guido does not give in to pressure from his superiors to acquit a certain López Meneses. The news of his refusal reaches Montesinos, the “Doc,” who sends two hitmen to kill him. They find him in his house, tie him to the bed, cover his mouth, and cutoff body parts until he is left in pieces. This brutal butchery is recorded on video for the enjoyment of the SIN’s factotum, but Cueto does not describe the operation in the novel, preferring to focus on the victim’s state of consciousness: what he feels, what meaning he derives from these brief final moments. In contrast, Lombardi and his screenwriter omit this moment, choosing instead to present it in a later scene, when Gaby has already decided to take revenge on her boyfriend’s killers. In Mariposa negra, the character of Guido is only seen in a video, tortured and dying, when Gaby watches the tape of the macabre surgery—along with the film’s viewers, and her friend, the tabloid journalist Ángela (Magdyel Ugaz)—with the faces and voices of the torturers who drink beer while they “work.” The director and his screenwriter were aware of the meaning of this narrative moment, and they exploit it well in the film. The scene’s monstrosity consists not only of the bloody spectacle of knives

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cutting away pieces of human flesh; the abjection also results from the use of this recording as a visual double that, while intended for Montesinos and all those who would enjoy watching it, ends up operating in Gaby’s memories. In the film, Lombardi and Pollarolo show the audiovisual as-is (not as a written reference, as Cueto does in his novel). By having this scene “cite” itself, the author not only questions the factual powers of Fujimorismo, but tacitly, the scene is also directed to us, the viewers, and our voyeuristic desire. In the second narrative nucleus, toward the story’s end, the film takes on an ideological point of view different from that of the written text. In the film, Gaby remains determined in her mission to take revenge by killing Vladimiro Montesinos. She has sought out Doty Pacheco (Ivonne Fraysinett), an influential woman in her fifties, with whom she agrees to have a transactional lesbian relationship with the goal of contacting the “Doc.” Doty Pacheco gets her a job, which turns out to be working as a high-class prostitute in the Hotel América, where Montesinos often hosts military officials and other powerful guests. The fame of “Moira”— Gaby’s alias—reaches Montesinos, and he has her brought to the SIN. Gaby is received in a room in the SIN’s headquarters, and is offered a glass of whiskey while she waits for the “Doc.” Montesinos’s death is staged twice: once fantasized, and once failed. In Gaby’s fantasy, Montesinos enters the SIN room and asks her to dance. In his arms, she draws the knife and drives it home toward his liver. Vladimiro falls before GabyMoira. In the scene of the failed attempt, Gaby-Moira reappears in the waiting room with the glass of whiskey in her hand, returning the viewer to a state of historical verisimilitude. Montesinos arrives, pays her a lustful compliment, then takes her in his arms to dance. She agrees, trembling, and her maneuver with the knife fails. The “Doc” cries out and shoves her off him, then two henchmen subdue her and take her away. She will not be seen again. Unlike the film’s version of the ending, in his novel, Cueto had “saved” Gaby through the intervention of various characters who do not appear in the film. They are the novelist’s deus ex machina to guide the story toward an ending of reconciliation, perhaps coinciding with the optimism, still prevalent in 2003, provoked by the demise of Fujimori. On the contrary, in Mariposa negra, the facts end up being final, harsh, and more closely adjusted to the realities of history. In its epilogue, the film Mariposa negra closes at the same point at which it started: Ángela is waiting outside the gate of the SIN for Gaby to come out, with her inner monologue describing the story of the events.

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Her voice is heard as she writes and then proceeds to visit the cemetery with flowers that she puts in the empty niche next to Guido’s, where Gaby told her she would like to be buried. Through their circularity, Ángela’s verbal enunciation and writing are placed at the crux of the filmic story; they frame it as a testimonial. In effect, Lombardi-Pollarolo’s adaptation is presented as a fictional testimony, unlike the story told by the novel’s omniscient narrator. What is the meaning of this change of the narrative point of view? Three observations can be made here. First, the importance of visuality, since the testimony of the journalist, Ángela, must necessarily be that of the experience she lived; she must have seen the recorded crime scene with Gaby and helped in the search for those who committed the crime. She sees and transcribes the distinct moments that lead to a necessarily tragic conclusion. Second, the meaning of the optic element of the story, which always refers to the hidden and the transgressive, to that which is alien to the public realm but that the cameras help to reveal. In this sense, Mariposa negra pays homage to the title of the novel, Grandes miradas , making a premise of the perversity of the act of watching in various aspects: the perverse pleasure of the “Doc,” who is simultaneously the “producer,” actor, and viewer of videos used to manipulate high politics; the spectacle of the video of Guido’s death; and the gazes of the audience, our own gazes, swept along and wrapped up in our own scopic drives. Third, both the testimony and the story as a whole describe, in an exemplary manner, the subjective journey of the pain provoked by this paramilitary omnipotence. Thus, Lombardi and Pollarolo create an “exemplary” story based on Gaby’s death (probably in the basement of the SIN) that contributes to developing this memory in those viewers who did not live through the violence.

La hora azul While Grandes miradas recalls the detective genre, La hora azul may be considered a “victims’ novel,” since its author places himself on the side of those who lacked any protection during the internal war (Camacho Delgado 2006, p. 250). Evelyne Pégot-Ogier chose to adapt this complex and powerful novel, winner of the 2005 Herralde Prize, for her directorial debut. Her project materialized as an exclusively Peruvian production, granted funding by the Ministry of Culture, and released in 2014 at the Montreal Film Festival (IMDB 2019b). It was a commercial failure, with

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a scarce 3600 viewers (Tamayo and Hendrickx 2018, p. 167), in my opinion due to the quality of the product. In both the novel and the film, Adrián Ormache, a well-known lawyer, knew little about his father, a high-ranking military officer who is now dead. After his mother’s death, Adrián finds an old blackmail letter asking her for one thousand dollars a month in exchange for not reporting the torture and captivity suffered by Miriam, a young indigenous woman from Ayacucho whom Major Ormache made his sex slave. His mother kept up with the payments for years to avoid scandal, but when Adrián finds out, he puts an end to the blackmail and sets off on a long search for Miriam, finally locating her in a Lima suburb where she cares for a son and manages a hair salon. This journey through space represents a perplexing displacement in the internal time of his memory. The search for Miriam calms his anxiety to discover the truth about his father: the letter is “the ticket to an uncertain journey toward the enchanted region of evil” (Cueto 2005, p. 271). An ambiguous but intense relationship that will transform Adrián is formed up between him and Miriam. When she suddenly dies of a heart attack, Adrián accepts the role of legal beneficiary/inheritor of his presumed brother, Miguel. The epilogue shows Adrián years later, reconciled and forever comfortable, as he meets again with Miguel. Although the film adaptation’s succession of events and dialogues clings closely to the novel’s structure, the differences are vast when taking into account their distinct aesthetic approaches. In the novel, Cueto’s enveloping, elevated prose gives the narrative discourse independence from the characters, while in the film, this distance is cut short. The film has access to resources of iconicity that writing lacks, but even then, Pégot-Ogier limits herself to a selective copy-and-paste from the original dialogue in the novel to the scripted version, and to a mise-en-scene of dead time, inexpressive gazes, mediocre lighting, and scarce movement. This is noticeable at a crucial moment of the story, when Adrián’s father makes a request to him on his deathbed: “(…) I want you to know something, a girl (…) I met when I was in the war (…) I don’t know if you can find her (…), look for her if you can. In Huanta. A girl from there. I ask of you, please. Before I die” (Cueto 2005, p. 23). Left out of the film, this paternal order drives Adrián to recover the forgotten identity of the absent Father. The turning point is the discovery of Miriam’s world of suffering, of her helplessness and poverty, followed by friendship and unexpected

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death. For Adrián, coming to know Miriam transforms his initial individual inquiry into a convoluted mystery (“she had rebuilt his ghost and returned it to me,” Cueto 2005, p. 271), which in turn distances him from his bourgeois surroundings and his comfortable life. However, this is not made clear in the film. The problem lies not only in the exclusion of that paternal request and the limitations of the filmic mise-en-scene and its monotone conversations, but also in the disproportionate exposition of the lifestyle of the upper bourgeois characters. By contrast, Adrián who becomes immersed in the terra incognita of Peru, far from the luxuries of clubs, fine houses, and money, loses his central place. He could have become a sort of emissary for the spectator as he travels down the muddy streets of San Juan de Lurigancho in his car, or when he reaches Huanta, “(…) where this book was born,” (Cueto 2005, p. 181), not to mention when he gets to Luricocha, the little town that is home to what remains of Miriam’s dwindling family. However, none of this is captured in the film. When Susannah Radstone underlines the “visuality of memory” (2010, p. 327), she alludes to the sensoriality of what is remembered, to the inevitable retinal record of past experience, and therefore to the psychological recovery of some experience previously erased or forgotten, that had found its place in some remote space or time. And the visuality of the individual mnemic trace allows for the collective recovery of directly shared past events, but also of all that which, even if not lived directly, became socialized because it was publicly important, and whose echo might reverberate through film. In this way, social frames of memory (Halbwachs 1975 [1925]) are established. These foundations of the French theory of representations have been extended by Langberg’s conceptualization of a prosthetic memory (2004). As is well known, modern audiovisual culture has contributed enormously to the virtual implanting in memory of happenings that were not directly experienced.4 According to Langberg, this is due to the audiovisual viewer’s affective commitment to a diegesis that succeeds in reproducing reality, equivalent to an aesthetic, bodily stimulus (2004, pp. 28–29). The possibility of achieving this implanting was the opportunity Pégot-Ogier missed in La hora azul and which therefore contributes to its lack of affective impact. In the film, Miriam (Jackelyne Vásquez) does not work through the traumatic memories of her family’s murders, the officer’s abuses, and her captivity in the barracks embedded in her soul. Above all, Pégot-Ogier omitted Miriam’s long nighttime journey, fleeing from the barracks to

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the house of her uncle Vittorino Anco (Reynaldo Arenas) in Huamanga: a journey taken at that blue hour that precedes the dawn. The director settled for verbally reproducing the novel’s text, in what then seems like an homage to literature by the moving image. What would have been a more successful cinematic translation of this important moment in the novel would have been to revive on screen the protagonist’s immense effort in her brave journey into the night, as well as to transmit to both Adrián and the spectators, that painful memory she was experiencing. This would have allowed, had the film been successful and attracted an audience, the power of this scene to be incorporated into the collective memory of the spectators. In sum, the mise-en-scene of La hora azul suffers from two limitations. First is the ideologization of the characters and the settings, as if the story were told from the point of view of Lima’s high society. In Pégot-Ogier’s film, the settings and the personal traits of Adrián Ormache are dominated by the sterile climates of elegant offices, houses, and cars, while his crises of conscience are either scarce or badly acted. Characters from the lower social classes are stereotyped, except for Vittorino Anco, portrayed by Reynaldo Arenas in a more nuanced way. In addition, Miriam lacks indigenous features in her appearance and speech; her acting is unimpressive and implies little interest on the part of the filmmakers in giving strength to the world whose side the narrator–protagonist takes. Second, the production is limited and inadequate. The application of the theme of memory is very weak in spite of the verbal stories of past times that would have allowed the film to present spaces or times in audiovisual format that were recalled or evoked. Moreover, the reality of San Juan de Lurigancho or Huanta is not shown on screen, despite its being essential in order to present the physical frame of the characters’ experience and open up some space for critical reflection.

Magallanes The film project Magallanes came to fruition thanks to a five-sided alliance between two Peruvian businesses, Péndulo and Tondero, along with CEPA Audiovisual of Argentina, Proyectil of Colombia, and Nephilim of Spain. It was shown in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Turkey, Mexico, Switzerland, Spain, and Peru. It brought in total gross earnings of a little under a million dollars (IMDB 2019a), of which more than a third came from the 89,000 filmgoers who attended screenings

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in Peru in 2015 (Tamayo and Hendrickx 2018, p. 167). This relative commercial success shows, particularly through the film’s successful international distribution, the connection many diverse audiences feel with the theme of memory, when addressed through a convincing mise-en-scene and characterization. This is the case of this first feature film from Salvador del Solar, a very free adaptation of Alonso Cueto’s La pasajera (2015), a short novel written the same year the film was released. This was a collaborative adaptation: the novel itself is dedicated to Salvador del Solar. If La pasajera picks up on various significant themes of La hora azul, Magallanes incorporates even more elements of this novel and eliminates a few others from La pasajera, even underlining aspects ignored in the film La hora azul as already discussed. All of this aids the reader and the viewer in taking in the stories as a series of intertextual references, through which the plots and characters “watch” each other, enveloped in a permanent state of transfiguration. This adaptation is practically the antithesis of Pégot-Ogier’s work. Here, the changes to the characters, plot points, and conclusion are far from mere transliterations to the audiovisual. The protagonist of the novel, La pasajera, is Delia, a woman from Huanta, troubled and suffering, who has migrated to Lima with her young daughter Viviana. Like Miriam in La hora azul , Delia lost her family during the internal war and was made a sex slave, serving soldiers and low-ranking army officers by order of Captain Arturo Olea. In La pasajera, Colonel Rivero—whose role corresponds to that of the abuser Major Ormache in La hora azul — is instead emotionally distant from Delia, limiting himself to deciding upon her enslavement. The action develops years after the internal war. The colonel is now retired and lost to Alzheimer’s. Captain Arturo, also retired, hates the other officer and lives consumed by his remorse for having obeyed the colonel in demanding sexual services of Delia, who fears him in turn. Arturo suffers a great deal; the day after his return to Lima, his wife and daughter die, run over in a traffic accident. His desperate solitude further empowers his guilt toward Delia. He visits her at her hair salon and asks for a haircut. As soon as he identifies himself, offering her help, she recognizes him and throws him out. The plot of Magallanes is different from that of the novel La pasajera, and in turn, has greater similarities with the novel La hora azul . Celina (Magaly Solier), also from Huanta, is called “la Ñusta” (the princess) by the soldiers, and occupies the role of Miriam, this time subjected by the Colonel (Federico Luppi) to ruthless captivity, with no hint of emotion.

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In Magallanes , Captain Arturo becomes a lower ranking subordinate, Harvey Magallanes (Damián Alázar), who works as a taxi driver and regularly takes the colonel, who suffers from advanced dementia, for drives in his car. In addition, Dr. Augusto Rivero, the colonel’s son (Christian Meier)—the Adrián Ormache of the novel La hora azul —is a less important character: a successful lawyer without connections to Celina, unlike the colonel’s son in La hora azul, who is the protagonist. Beyond this game of changing roles, Magallanes stands in contrast to the film La hora azul in the characterization of its characters. Del Solar succeeded in capturing Alonso Cueto’s ability for observation, giving prominence to the gray and depressive retired captain of La pasajera while transforming him into the Harvey Magallanes of the film, the skilled taxi driver, eager to survive and with a gift for drawing. It is he who one day takes Celina to an evangelical church and then follows her, finally seeking her out and asking her for a haircut when she does not know who he is. During the haircut, the taxi driver could have spoken the same words as Adrián in La hora azul , faced with an identical situation: “(…) she was handling the scissors close to my throat. The blades moved centimeters from my body. If she had recognized me, perhaps she would have felt it within her rights to cut my throat in the seconds that followed.” (Cueto 2005, p. 207) However, in Del Solar’s film, Magallanes tells her who he is. She then threatens him with the scissors and throws him out. By reopening the traumatic wounds of her captivity in the barracks of Huanta, this encounter gives centrality to the film’s memory work regarding the war. Not long later, Celina suffers a panic attack in which she repeats Miriam’s desperate flight, ending in the “blue hour” of Huamanga, running and crying in the middle of the night, but this time over the hills to the north of Lima. In this scene, the suffering of the past reappears in the present like a nightmare, just as the space of Ayacucho is transferred to San Juan de Lurigancho. Magallanes captures the spirit of a bustling, working-class Lima. Harvey Magallanes (Chacho in La hora azul ) convinces his sister Hermelinda (Tatiana Espinoza) to blackmail Dr. Rivero (the equivalent to Adrián Ormache) by sending him a copy of a photo of a seminude Celina, taken by Rivero himself, sitting on the colonel’s lap with a rifle in her hand. In the novel, this is how Adrián sets off after Miriam to uncover the blackmail, but in Magallanes the plot is hatched in the Rímac neighborhood alleyway where Hermelinda lives. The film becomes a thriller. The blackmail fails. After that, along with Milton (Bruno

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Odar)—the substitute for Guayo, Chacho’s partner in crime in La hora azul —Magallanes plans the successful kidnapping of the colonel’s son, who is tortured by Milton and raped as Celina was raped in Ayacucho. Magallanes seeks out Celina again, with the ransom in hand, but she does not accept it. Soon after, Milton gives away what they have done. The film’s final scene takes place in the police station where Magallanes, Celina, and Dr. Rivero are all present. The latter drops the charges and offers the full recovered sum of the ransom to Celina, who rejects it and furiously rebukes him in Quechua—one of the film’s highpoints. Rivero says goodbye, Celina says she will return to her lands, and the police commissioner declares that “nothing happened here.” Each one of the working-class characters bears the weight of his or her memories of the conflict: Celina bears the scars of her captivity and the son given to her by the colonel; Magallanes, having acted as an accomplice in the colonel’s abuses, becomes a blackmailer and kidnapper; Milton, a sadistic rapist, drunkenly longs for the blue Ayacucho sky and “the adrenaline” of violence. In contrast, the colonel has forgotten everything; his amnesia is a metaphor for the past as absence, as the disappearance of the guiding thread of meaning. The story of “la Ñusta” in Magallanes overshadows that of Delia, her double in La pasajera. In the written story, Cueto gave her a local suitor. Enrique, a timid accountant, guitarist, and singer in his forties, sets off after her, attracted by Delia’s fantasies about a bucolic, peaceful Huanta. In contrast, Del Solar eliminates this happy ending, erasing Enrique and opting instead for a thriller that emphasizes the scars that the violence has left on Celina, whose figure, as Cynthia Vich points out (2019, pp. 5–6), is far from the conciliatory image Cueto presents in the novel.

Conclusion Although they are based on literary texts by the same author, the three films discussed here have more differences than similarities. Their testimonies of the political and sexual violence that took place in the last decade of the past century—represented in two of them through similar characters—allows them to open up a wide range of filmic treatments with different impacts on their audience. This can be discussed from three angles: the cinematographic treatment of time and memory, the positions of filmic enunciation, and the characteristics of the audience. First, none

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of the three films resorts to the conventional flashback for the visual “illustration” of remembered events. In Mariposa negra, the video of Guido’s torture and murder that is shown to Gaby is the visual discovery of his horrible death, which she experiences and cries over, but it is not shown as it happens. She watches the video in order to find the murderer, but at the same time this is “memory work” in order to ritually come to terms with the pain of mourning. There is nothing of this sort in La hora azul , but in Magallanes the act of remembering has an impact on the characters’ behavior and movements: above all, on Celina’s long nighttime journey over the hills of San Juan de Lurigancho, a delirious and post-traumatic acting out of her flight through Ayacucho at the blue hour. But in this film, there are also the sharp scissors she holds against Magallanes’ neck in a gesture of rejection toward the former soldier; there is Milton and Magallanes’s intense evocation of their drunken times in Huamanga; and the powerful memories of Celina’s subjugation, brought back to Magallanes by the photo he keeps of her, much younger and sitting on the officer’s knee. In respect to the treatment of memory, Radstone makes a pertinent reflection (2010, p. 327) on the mnemic magnetism of the fixed image over the illusion of movement in film, which Roland Barthes had already discussed from a different perspective. For the French semiotician every photograph has a punktum, a detail, a portion of its space that makes it unique by transmitting the particular energies emerging from the personal contemplation of a time gone by and now frozen (1980, p. 73). Magallanes’s drawing of “la Ñusta” evokes, and infects the viewer with, the same memory. Perhaps photographic images of the victims’ painful past are those which most effectively interpellate the spectator, as the Yuyanapaq exhibition has also demonstrated. Secondly, the filmic enunciation, that is, from where the story is narrated, who tells it and who watches should be highlighted here. De Vivanco and Fabry (2013, p. 19) draw a distinction between victims of repression in the Southern Cone, often educated and with a greater ability to speak up publicly, and victims of the Peruvian conflict, most of whom are economically, racially, and culturally marginalized. For example, Luis Puenzo’s La historia oficial [The Official Story] (1985) and Andrés Wood’s Machuca (2004) reveal how the misfortunes brought on by repression were evoked upon the return to democracy, in Argentina and Chile, respectively, through characters who occupy privileged social positions. By contrast, in much of the Peruvian cinema about the internal armed conflict, Peruvian victims are characters that are rarely written into

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any narrative, due to many of them being Quechua-speaking peasants. Only a handful of filmmakers—Lombardi in La boca del lobo [The Lion’s Den] (1988), Nilo Pereira in Ni con Dios ni con el diablo [Neither with God nor the Devil] (1990), and Marianne Eyde in La vida es una sola [You Only Live Once] (1993)—deal with such characters. Nonetheless, with the possible exception of Eyde, the discourses of these filmmakers, as well-intentioned as they may be, have not spoken from the place of the victims, but rather both from and for the middle classes, as in the case of the films from the Southern Cone mentioned above. Mariposa negra does not foreground class relations sensu stricto as a politically critical thriller. In addition, La hora azul certainly bears a clear stamp of class that defines its position of enunciation. By contrast, in Magallanes , the posture of enunciation is complex and honest through Celina’s main role in the final section, through Magallanes himself, and through the sharp, effective portrayal of the conflict in the last scene, far from Cueto’s perspective of reconciliation in La pasajera (Vich 2019, p. 11). With Celina, Del Solar has created a memorable character, letting her rebuke us in Quechua, enunciating this scene from the position of the victim. Finally, it is important to comment on the place of the target audiences, something derived from the previous points. In more advanced cinematographies, genres related to historical memory abound; the audience recognizes them easily thanks to pre-established pacts of reading, to the extent that historical memories are permeated by the audience’s filmic memories, as in the case of films about the Holocaust and Nazi persecution. On the other hand, the cultural industries often cast light on other eras in order to idealize them, as in the case of Hollywood’s “nostalgia films” focusing on the 1950s (Sprengler 2009, pp. 39–66), “inventing” memories that, in turn, obliterate other less attractive memories. This sort of false memory, critiqued by Fredric Jameson (1991), appears precisely and successfully in Peru during the second decade of this century. Productions like Av. Larco [Larco Avenue] (2017) or the ¡Asu Mare! trilogy (2013, 2015, 2018), among others, suggest that the new middle classes that watch them would perhaps prefer to forget, almost the opposite of the “working through” of memory work that seeks to dig up the abominations of the past so as to exorcize them. Nonetheless, currently in Peru there is also a (more limited) “second generation” process in which traumatic memories are re-elaborated and aestheticized; what Hirsch (2008, pp. 105–106) has referred to as “postmemory” when discussing the Holocaust. One might wonder, along with Elisabeth Jelin,

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“Who is the ‘we’ with the legitimate right to remember? Is it an exclusive ‘we,’ in which only those who ‘lived’ the events can participate, or is there room to broaden this we…?” (2002, pp. 69–70). In today’s practice of postmemory in Peru, those sectors that were only marginally affected by the armed conflict should also participate. In this process, this national “we” is still in the making, and the three films analyzed here contribute in their own way to its construction, as they can also provoke an intertextual phenomenon, inspiring other screenwriters and directors to help it grow, adding flesh to the prosthetic memories such that they grow over time. Historical memory in Peru is an arena of intense symbolic struggles, and in the future its battles will be waged ever more frequently through film, given the identificatory connections that the visuality of memory creates. This chapter was translated by Arthur Dixon.

Notes 1. I use quotation marks here because the term “screen” (pantalla in Spanish) was practically unused until the nineties. Before, it was understood that a sala or “theater” had a single screen by default. The measurement of box office numbers changed along with this shift. 2. The novel La ciudad y los perros was translated to English as The Time of the Hero (1966), differing from the title of its film adaptation. 3. Ribeyro (1955). 4. Within the field of memory studies, Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory is the most commonly cited. It is discussed in greater depth at the end of this essay.

Works Cited ¡Asu Mare!, 2013. [film] Directed by Ricardo Maldonado. Peru: Tondero Films. ¡Asu Mare! 2, 2015. [film] Directed by Ricardo Maldonado. Peru: Tondero Films. ¡Asu Mare! 3, 2018. [film] Directed by Jorge Ulloa. Peru: Tondero Films. Av. Larco [Larco Avenue], 2017. [film] Directed by Jorge Carmona. Peru: Tondero Films. Barthes, R., 1980. La chambre claire. Note sur la photographie. Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma/Gallimard/Seuil. Bayly, J., 1994. No se lo digas a nadie. Barcelona: Seix Barral.

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Bedoya, R., 1992. 100 años de cine en el Perú: una historia crítica. Lima: Universidad de Lima/Instituto de Cooperación Iberoamericana. Bedoya, R., 1997. Entre fauces y colmillos. Las películas de Francisco Lombardi. Huesca: Festival de Cine de Huesca. Caídos del cielo [Fallen From Heaven], 1990. [film] Directed by Francisco J. Lombardi. Peru and Spain: Inca Film, Quinto Centenario, TVD, and Tornasol Films. Camacho Delgado, J. M., 2006. Alonso Cueto y la novela de las víctimas. C.M. H. L. B. Caravelle, 86, pp. 247–264. Congrains, E., 1957. No una sino muchas muertes [Not One But Many Deaths]. Buenos Aires: Embajada cultural peruana. Cueto, A., 1983. La batalla del pasado [The Battle of the Past]. Madrid: Alfaguara. Cueto, A., 2003. Grandes miradas [Knowing Gazes]. Lima: Peisa. Cueto, A., 2005. La hora azul [Before Dawn]. Lima: Peisa/Anagrama. Cueto, A., 2015. La pasajera [The Passenger]. Lima: Planeta. de Cárdenas, F., 2014. El cine de Francisco Lombardi. Una visión crítica del Perú. Santiago de Chile: Uqbar. Dostoyevsky, F., 2015. Crime and Punishment. London: Penguin. Filmaffinity, 2019. Black Butterfly [online]. Available at: [Accessed 12 December 2019]. Halbwachs, M., 1975 [1925]. Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire. Paris-La Haye: Mouton. Hirsch, M., 2008. Poetics of Memory: Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics, 29(1). Available at: [Accessed 14 December 2019]. IMDB, 2019a. Magallanes [online]. Available at: [Accessed 12 December 2019]. IMDB, 2019b. La hora azul [online]. Available at: [Accessed 12 December 2019]. Jameson, F., 1991. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Jelin, E., 2002. Los trabajos de la memoria. Madrid: Siglo XXI. La boca del lobo [The Lion’s Den], 1988. [film] Directed by Francisco J. Lombardi. Peru and Spain: Inca Film, New People´s Cinema, Tornasol Films, and Twinray. La historia oficial [The Official Story], 1985. [film] Directed by Luis Puezo. Argentina: Historias contematográficas Cinemamania and Progress Communications. La hora azul [Before Dawn], 2016. [film] Directed by Evelyne Pégot-Ogier. Peru: Panda Films.

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Landsberg, A., 2004. Prosthetic Memory, the Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture [e-book]. New York: Columbia University Press. Available at: [Accessed 8 August 2019]. La vida es una sola [You Only Live Once], 1993. [film] Directed by Marianne Eyde. Peru: Kusi Films. Machuca, 2004. [film] Directed by Andrés Wood. Chile, Spain, UK, and France: Wood producciones and Tornasol Films. Magallanes, 2015. [film] Directed by Salvador del Solar. Peru, Argentina, and Spain: CEPA audiovisual, Nephilim producciones, Péndulo Films, and Tondero. Mariposa negra [Black Butterfly], 2006. [film] Directed by Francisco J. Lombardi. Peru and Spain: Fausto producciones cinematográficas and Inca Films. Maruja en el infierno [Maruja in Hell], 1983. [film] Directed by Francisco J. Lombardi. Peru: Inca Films. Mejía Ticona, V., 2007. Ilusiones a oscuras. Cines en Lima. Lima: Forma e imagen. Ni con Dios ni con el diablo [Neither with God nor the Devil], 1990. [film] Directed by Nilo Pereira. Peru and France: Urpi. No se lo digas a nadie [Don’t Tell Anyone], 1998. [film] Directed by Francisco J. Lombardi. Peru and Spain: Inca Films and Lola Films. Ojos que no ven [What the Eye Doesn’t See], 2003. [film] Directed by Francisco Lombardi. Peru: Aldea Films, I.J.V. comunicación, and Incacine. Protzel, J., 1995. Grandeza y decadencia del espectáculo cinematográfico. Contratexto, 9, pp. 111–125. Radstone, S., 2010. Cinema and Memory. In: S. Radstone, and B. Schwarz, eds. Memory: History, Theories, Debates. New York: Fordham University. pp. 325– 343. Ribeyro, J. R., 1955. Los gallinazos sin plumas. Peru: Círculo de novelistas peruanos. Sin compasión [Without Compassion], 1994. [film] Directed by Francisco J. Lombardi. Peru, Mexico, and France: CiBy 2000, Cine latinoamericano, and Fundación del nuevo. Sprengler, C., 2009. Screening Nostalgia: Populuxe Props and Technicolor Aesthetics in Contemporary American Film [e-book]. London and Oxford: Berghahn. Available at: [Accessed 8 August 2019]. Tamayo, A. and Hendrickx, N., 2018. Financiamiento, distribución y marketing del cine peruano. Lima: Universidad de Lima.

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Universidad del Pacífico, 2017. Impacto económico del sector cinematográfico y audiovisual y análisis costo-beneficio de la implementación del Anteproyecto de la Ley de la Cinematografía y el Audiovisual [pdf]. Lima: Universidad del Pacífico. Available at: [Accessed 5 April 2019]. Vargas Llosa, M., 1963. La ciudad y los perros [The City and the Dogs]. Barcelona: Seix Barral. Vargas Llosa, M., 1973. Pantaleón y las visitadoras [Captain Pantoja and the Special Service]. Barcelona: Seix Barral. Vich, C., 2019. De desadaptaciones y reiteradas violencias: la distancia entre el film Magallanes y la novela La pasajera. In: G. Pollarolo, ed. 2019. Cine y literatura: nuevas aproximaciones a viejas polémicas: cine/literatura. Lima: PUCP. pp. 188–204. Vivanco, L. and Fabry, G., 2013. Introducción: las memorias y la tinta. In: L. Vivanco, ed. 2013. Las memorias y la tinta: ensayos sobre la representación de la violencia política en Argentina, Chile y Perú [e-book]. Santiago de Chile: Universidad Alberto Hurtado. Available at: [Accessed 5 July 2019].

CHAPTER 14

Do Executioners Have Souls? La última tarde and La hora final: Representations of the “Insurgent” Character in Peruvian Fiction Cinema Karen Bernedo

In many societies that have gone through wars and armed conflicts, cultural production has become fertile ground through which to express and demonstrate the nature and experience of violence. For Elizabeth Jelin, the mark of trauma “intervenes centrally in what the subject can and cannot remember, silence, forget, and elaborate” (2002, p. 17). Moreover, the mark of trauma also intervenes in what the subject is able to represent, and in that regard, a significant proportion of this cultural production is, to a large extent, a reflection more of the present than of the past. For some researchers, it is an artistic and cultural production that is doing the work of mourning in post-war Peru (Vich 2015, p. 17). Narratives from the Peruvian cultural repertoire have made violence their

K. Bernedo (B) Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Lima, Peru © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 C. Vich and S. Barrow (eds.), Peruvian Cinema of the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52512-5_14

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subject and have worked at building the imaginary and the collective memory of the war in Peruvian society; art is evidence and testimony of past and present that have been terribly fractured (Milton 2018, p. 31). Cultural production has also been a space for dissidence, successfully questioning hegemonic memories and official discourses around the internal armed conflict. Carlos Ivan Degregori (2002, p. 24) spoke of “windows of opportunity,” referring to democratic transitions as favorable contexts in which to accommodate dissidence. In this regard, it is the subjectivity of representation that, to a large extent, has succeeded in recognizing the complexities of Peru’s past, bringing to light the wounds and tensions implied by confronting the consequences and echoes of the war. One of the most decisive and problematic aspects of this process is the relationship one is able to establish with the perpetrators: those who are responsible for the trauma and pain produced in the conflict The present text’s reflections are focused on representations of the “insurgent”1 perpetrator in Peruvian fiction cinema, referring in particular to those members of civil society who voluntarily decided to form part of the subversive organizations of the Peruvian internal war: the Communist Party of Peru–Shining Path,2 and the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement—MRTA.3 The figure of the militant continues to generate tensions and controversies in the public sphere, and representations of this figure in cultural production are not exempt from the same concerns. This analysis proposes that representations of the “insurgents” in fiction cinema have been limited to the common tropes of revolutionary discourse, emerging more from the propaganda pamphlet format and not as a field of argumentation in itself. I argue that this form of representation of the “insurgents” is a product of the imaginary constructed on the basis of public discourses of memory, as well as a reflection of the way in which Peruvian society has been able to relate to the “insurgents” as perpetrators. This chapter will develop this point of view in four ways: the distribution of responsibilities as a legacy of the Peruvian internal war; the representation of violence within the paradigm of human rights; the construction of the imaginary of the “insurgent” as “subject of evil” (Agüero 2017, p. 16); and, finally, the limitations of the conditions of production and exhibition of fiction cinema in relation to the representation of the militant. This analysis seeks to explore films produced in recent years whose characters form part of this spectrum: La última tarde [The Last Afternoon] (2017) by Joel Calero and La hora final [The Final Hour] (2018) by Eduardo Mendoza de Echave. Both films develop the character of

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the “insurgents” with greater complexity than other previous representations in Peruvian fiction cinema, as the protagonists are contextualized within particular realities and experiences that avoid the reductionism and Manichean simplification of attributing their decisions to fanaticism and madness.

Distribution of Responsibilities as a Legacy of the Internal War in Peru The Peruvian internal armed conflict started in May of 1980, when the Maoist-Leninist group the Communist Party of Peru–Shining Path (PCP-SL) declared war on the Peruvian state and began its armed struggle. They committed murders, collective massacres, and extrajudicial killings, along with a series of other crimes. The conflict’s militarization by the Peruvian state in 1982 and the lack of clarity and ethics in the antisubversive policies and strategies of the armed forces led to an increase in the spiral of violence; the twenty years of internal war took a toll of 69,280 victims killed, 16,000 disappeared, and half a million displaced and tortured, as well as countless wounds and outstanding debts in terms of justice and reparations.4 According to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR, for its initials in Spanish), whose Final Report was published in 2003, the internal armed conflict was, without a doubt, the most “intense, extensive, and prolonged” episode of violence in the history of the Republic of Peru, due to the magnitude of its consequences and the gross violations of human rights committed against civilians by subversive organizations and security forces. The following are a few important statistics in order to understand the post-war context: Shining Path was responsible for the majority, nearly 54%, of the killings; the Armed Forces for 35%; and the MRTA for just under 2%.5 Both subversive organizations were militarily defeated during the Alberto Fujimori administrations of the 1990s: Shining Path was defeated in September of 1992 with the capture of its leader Abimael Guzmán and the subsequent signing of a peace agreement in 1993, and the MRTA was overcome in 1997 with the rescue of hostages from the Japanese embassy in Operation Chavín de Huántar. During the 1990s, Alberto Fujimori—with the support of his administration’s media apparatus—popularized a discourse based on the state’s success in capturing the Shining Path leader. This discourse asserts that any violations of rights by the state are justified as a social cost of

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achieving peace; Carlos Iván Degregori called this “savior memory” (2002, p. 45). Through campaigns conceived in order to generate popular fear that the times of terror might return at any moment, this “savior memory” gained strength and became more widely accepted. On the other hand, the human rights movement articulated a different narrative which Durand calls “civic memory” (2005, p. 27), in which the civilian population is seen as a passive actor caught in the crossfire between two monsters: the subversive organizations and the security forces. Both discourses of memory agree that the primary responsibility for the internal armed conflict lies with the subversive organizations. To this day, Shining Path has undertaken no self-critical evaluation of its responsibility in the process of political violence, and while the MRTA has undertaken such self-reflection through the testimonies of its former leaders, these evaluations have been neither accepted nor widely circulated. For this reason, despite their differences in tactics and their percentage of responsibility for violent acts, the former militants of the MRTA are considered just as guilty and dangerous as those of Shining Path.

Representing Violence within the Paradigm of Human Rights Reflections on the figure of the victim and representations of the victim have come from numerous and distinct perspectives; however, academic and cultural production that focuses on the perpetrator is scarce. The cultural boom surrounding political violence that came about after the publication of the CVR’s Final Report also placed the victim at the center of the narrative, as is evidenced by the artistic, traditional, and contemporary production in various techniques and formats that has been considered in several research projects over the past two decades in Peru (Ulfe 2011; Bernedo Morales 2017; Milton 2014; Gonzalez 2011; Ritter 2013; Saona 2017). For Elizabeth Jelin (2014), the interpretative framework of the paradigm of human rights focuses its fundamental interest on the victim and on the victim’s rights that were violated. Accordingly, the main question has been “What did they do to the victim?” rather than “What might the victim have done?” Many of the fiction films that have addressed political violence in Peru have also placed emphasis on victims as the central subjects of their narratives. For Pablo Malek, documentary cinema that addresses political violence maintains a discursive, direct, and proportional relationship

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between three factors: the evolution of the social context; the consolidation of discourses of memory; and knowledge of the subject matter that was gradually constructed (2016, p. 43). For Malek, a key reference point is the CVR’s Final Report: the documentaries made soon after its publication uphold a close discursive link to that document, whereas as they move away from the report in temporal terms, they progressively question its narrative. If Malek’s hypothesis is applied as a way of understanding representations of the figure of the “insurgent” in fiction cinema, three phases can be identified, the first of which is characterized by the small amount of knowledge that existed regarding the nature of the conflict. This group includes the films La boca del lobo [The Lion’s Den] (1988) and Alias La Gringa (1991). In both films, Shining Path represents a nebulous setting that surrounds the narrative, in which the group appears simply through graffiti and red flags. Both films take place in spaces disrupted by the violence, but Shining Path is configured only as an atmosphere. The “insurgent” character is built upon absence, as there are neither faces nor bodies, and if there are, they are distant and blurred. A second phase involves films focused on victims as main characters whose discourses enter into dialogue with both “savior” and “civic” memories. From this second period, one might mention the films Coraje [Courage] (1998), Paloma de papel [Paper Dove] (2003), Vidas paralelas [Parallel Lives] (2005), Tarata (2009), La última noticia [The Latest News] (2016), Av. Larco [Larco Ave.] (2017), and La casa rosada [The Pink House] (2018). In this group of films, the militants have faces, bear arms, murder, execute, serve as antagonists, and are characterized especially through physical movements, attire, ethnic traits, and facial expressions. For José Carlos Agüero, the “insurgents” were not considered as people, and as such there is nothing to know about them as individuals. “One must only fear them, not see them” (Agüero 2017). The presentation of the “insurgent” in this group of films is almost cartoonish, and these characters’ dialogue refers back constantly to the common tropes of revolutionary pamphlets. In their discourse, the words “people,” “revolution,” and “people’s war” are spoken without any further development or correlation with the construction of the character’s social universe, for example:

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We are the people and we want justice! Long live President Gonzalo, long live the people’s war! Homeland or death, we shall prevail! (Paloma de papel 2003) Death to those who rob the people, the people will deliver justice. Long live the Communist Party of Peru, Shining Path! Long live the people’s war, long live! (Coraje 1998) We are the Shining Path and we have come for a revolutionary contribution! Long live the people’s war! (Vidas paralelas 2007)

The third period includes films that problematize official stories and join with other voices within cultural production—plastic and visual arts, literature, essays, and academic production—that have worked to recognize the complexity of the perpetrator’s identity. In the 1990s, one exception was the film La vida es una sola [You Only Live Once] (1992), and two more exceptions from recent years are La última tarde and La hora final . Unlike the second group, these films do not place the victim alone at the center of the narrative; rather, based on the development of stories and particular, complex experiences, they elaborate a more substantive portrait of the “insurgent,” creating nuanced characters that transcend essentializing categories like those of the terruco,6 the “people,” and “revolution.”

The “Insurgents” Hannah Arendt warned in her essay on the banality of evil7 that those who are capable of committing heinous acts are neither monsters nor sick individuals, that their acts are not the product of an intrinsic evil, and that they can be “terribly and terrifyingly normal” (2003, p. 15). They are good neighbors, good sons and daughters, family men, workers with steady jobs, high school or university students. According to Arendt, they are people who form part of a system that has normalized cruelty and of a bureaucracy that is based upon execution, extermination, and torture. For Arendt, committing these acts simply makes them effective actors within this bureaucracy. In Peru, the militants of subversive organizations could be seen in these terms, along with those who, while forming part of security forces, violated the rights of civilians within these perverse

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bureaucracies. The letters affirming party loyalty with precepts like “carrying your life on your fingertips” are as exemplary as the army manuals indicating that “orders are to be followed without doubt or questioning.” For Arendt, these identities are not deeply rooted—that is, they are not born and they do not die with the perpetrator—but rather, they are a product of determined contexts and circumstances. In the case of the Peruvian internal armed conflict, certain voices have emerged that have opened a way toward a new understanding of these contexts. The testimonial stories of Lurgio Gavilán (2013), José Carlos Agüero (2015), and Alberto Gálvez Olaechea (2015) have lead their readers to question the archetypes of victim and victimizer, as well as the common tropes inherent to discourses about revolution and repression.8 Stern warned in the 1990s that reductionist logic must be avoided in efforts to explain Shining Path; that is, they must not be seen as a group of diabolical individuals who came together in the Andes in order to create terror (1999, p. 25). In this regard, one significant contribution is the text La ciudad acorralada [The Cornered City], an ethnographic investigation undertaken by Dynnik Asencios in the prisons of Lima, for which the author has collected around thirty testimonies about the motivations of young people in joining Shining Path as an alternative way of life.9 The book’s richness is found precisely in its having particularized their experience, deeply exploring stories that resist all simplification. For Arendt, understanding the system that produces these acts is in no way synonymous with justifying them, but is a step toward comprehension. For this reason, her proposal of the banality of evil was highly controversial, since until then it had been unthinkable to consider that acts as heinous as facilitating the deportation and extermination of millions of Jews could be the product of such a terrifyingly normal human being. In the same way, recognizing that a terrorist—a member of Shining Path or the MRTA—is not a monster whose evil is born and dies with him is almost unthinkable in the post-war context of present-day Peru, since it implies the challenge of recognizing some humanity within them. Their representation in cultural production presupposes the same challenge. The cultural repertoire that has cast its gaze over the figure of the armed militant, placing them at the center of the narrative, has generated a change in perspective in the ways in which the Peruvian internal armed conflict has been addressed. The focus on individual experiences has brought audiences face-to-face with flesh-and-blood human beings, within their particular, complex social universes. It has also opened up

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opportunities to problematize Peruvian society’s relationship with that which the perpetrators incarnate and represent. In fiction cinema, this production has increased in recent years. As mentioned above, in the 1990s only La vida es una sola succeeded in escaping from the Manichean construction of the Shining Path militant. It should be noted that, while this film was produced in Peru, it is possible that the Norwegian identity of its Peru-based director (Marianne Eyde) allowed for some distance to be created and facilitated a more complex perspective on the subject. A similar note regarding the complexity of representation and distance might be recorded in relation to the other documentary films, such as Sibila (2012) and Alias Alejandro (2005), both biographical portraits of Shining Path and MRTA militants with family connections to the films’ directors, produced from Chile, Spain, and Germany.10 It should further be noted that his type of cinematographic production, which offers a more human portrait of the “insurgents,” has encountered various obstacles in terms of exhibition. For example, La vida es una sola was only permitted screenings in Peru after the end of the Fujimori dictatorship (Ferreira 2015, p. 163); Alias Alejandro was uploaded to YouTube by its own director, only after his father (the film’s protagonist) was released from prison, ten years after the film was produced; finally, Sibila has not yet been released in Peru. Gálvez Olaechea warned that “somehow, in Peru, the war has not yet ended in the field of symbols, subjectivities, and paradigms” (2015, p. 141). The symbolic production of the violence continues in the crossfires of battles over memory. Proof of this are the censorship and controversy surrounding artifacts, exhibitions, and films of recent years, many of them charged or investigated under a new revision of the “defense of terrorism” law promoted by the majority Fujimorista parliament that governed until September of 2019. Understanding the perpetrator in all their humanity is perhaps one of the most difficult challenges of post-war societies. The representations of the perpetrator in art can act as a catalyst for projecting the fear, rejection, and deepest scorn of the society in question. At the other extreme, those same representations can be useful as a link toward understanding their actions, which presuppose the recognition that the perpetrators share the same human condition as all other social actors.

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´ La ultima tarde: Questioning the Common Tropes of Revolutionary Discourse La última tarde takes the form of a dialogue between two characters, Laura (Katerina D’Onofrio) and Ramón (Lucho Cáceres), who meet up after nineteen years to formalize their divorce. The process is delayed for hours for bureaucratic reasons, and during these hours they have the chance to converse and reflect about their lives and, in particular, about unresolved matters from the past. Laura is a publicist in Lima and Ramón is a microcredit salesman in Cuzco; the lengthy conversation around which the film is constructed takes place during a long walk through the streets of Barranco, a bohemian suburb of Lima. Over the course of the conversation, the characters’ social and psychological universe is framed through their life experiences and situations: Laura comes from a wealthy social class, while Ramon is middle class; both were active in a subversive organization that is never mentioned in the film, although the dialogue suggests this was the MRTA. However, for director Joel Calero, La última tarde is not a film about political violence; it is first and foremost a story of love and falling out of love, an opportunity to confront and cope with the responsibilities of the past (Calero 2019). It is in this way that the film succeeds in humanizing its characters, putting the coming together and coming apart of the emotional bond at the foreground of the narrative and leaving their identities as political subjects in the background. La última tarde problematizes, even through its production process, certain categories that form part of the everyday conception of the “insurgents,” such as terruco or the “people.” Calero has stated that the initial reaction of the actor who plays the film’s protagonist, upon reading the screenplay was to reject the role: “As long as those sons of bitches don’t ask for forgiveness (in the film) for what they did to this country, I don’t act,” responded Lucho Cáceres quite categorically (Calero 2017, p. 54). It took Calero two years to convince the actor to participate in the project; and as an initial exercise in approaching the role, he suggested that Cáceres stop calling the character a terruco. In exchange, and so that the actor could continue to express his disagreement with Ramón’s ideology, the director proposed that he might refer to him as a “criminal” or “murderer.” For the director, it was essential that Cáceres draw closer to the character he would portray, understanding his subtleties and complexities as human ones. This would simply not be possible if using the term terruco, as shown in the film when

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Laura tells Ramón that, for her father, the fact of having been a terruca placed her at the lowest level of the moral hierarchy—even worse than being a “whore”: So, by his logic, his little girl was absolutely capable of doing anything at all, any atrocity… And, on that scale, opening her legs to someone for a few dollars was much less serious than being a communist. (Laura, by Calero 2017, p. 47)

This quote reveals precisely the scope of the stereotype of the “insurgent”: for Laura’s father, to be a communist was to be a terrorist, and the latter was more “degrading” than prostitution. Joel Calero started writing the screenplay of La última tarde based on an exchange with a friend who was politically active during the 1980s. In letters in which both exchanged ideas about politics, his friend spoke to him of the “people” and their needs, while Calero questioned the term’s abstraction, its role as a common trope, and what he considered an idealized model, without any grip on present-day reality. La última tarde calls into question the common trope of revolutionary discourse regarding the meaning of the “people” through the character of Laura, whose reflections are enunciated through someone who supported revolution from the perspective of her own class conflict. Laura’s point of view offers an opportunity to understand the “insurgents” not only in relation to the utopia of a specific social context very different from that of the present, but also as subjects with political agency that completely blur the archetype of fanaticism and are able to examine and question this very utopia. In this way, Laura looks back critically at her own past: Who are the people, Ramón? (…) Because it seems like you’re talking about some special type of people with “class consciousness” (…) In my case, to be honest, all I know are “poor people” (…) and the only thing they want is to spend the weekend gulping down a Big Mac at a shopping mall. (Laura, by Calero 2017, p. 56)

Laura questions not only “the people” as a revolutionary subject, but also places the term in a context framed by neoliberalism, consumerism, and individualism. In this critical revision of the past, she is able to understand that this context has somehow buried the utopia to which she and Ramón were so devoted.

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In La última tarde, the passage of time is not in vain. The long dialogue between the two former militants brings to light the pain and loss of their stories: exile, death, broken bonds, everything they risked, open wounds, their own fears, and doubts regarding the decision they made at a different time in their lives. Laura and Ramón could easily have suffered a different fate; their stories are not unlike those found in the testimonies of imprisoned youth, such as those collected in Asencios’s ethnography, for example. Their stories are far from a reflection of an indoctrinated and dogmatic militant, seemingly carved out of stone, on whose skin the wounds of the war have left not a single trace.

La hora final: Humanizing the Hero and the Villain La hora final , by Eduardo Mendoza de Echave, premiered in September of 2017 in the context of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the capture of Abimael Guzmán. This detective genre film tells the story of one of the most important episodes in recent Peruvian history from the perspective of the police: the capture of the leader of Shining Path. Carlos Zambrano (Pietro Sibille) is the protagonist, a police officer who forms part of the Special Intelligence Group which carried out the operation. Zambrano is a complex character, tormented and overwhelmed by his lack of money and his emotional conflicts with his ex-wife, who, like many people at the time, wants to pursue a better future for herself and their son by migrating to another country. In this context of economic and emotional precarity, Zambrano is portrayed as someone who will do everything possible to capture the leader of the terrorist organization, not only to keep his son from leaving the country, but also to obtain the monetary reward offered by the state in exchange for the ringleader’s capture. Gabriela Coronado (Nidia Bermejo), on the other hand, is Zambrano’s coworker in the Special Intelligence Group. She is from Ayacucho, the province most severely affected by the violence; she is taciturn by nature; and she holds a secret: her brother, Fidel, is a member of Shining Path, the very enemy they must capture. Unlike La última tarde, the timeframe of La hora final is within the period of the internal armed conflict itself, which creates the challenge of showing the light and dark sides of both victims and victimizers at the same time as the violence itself, not through the reflexive gaze of hindsight.

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The medical anthropologist Kimberly Theidon has written that the internal armed conflict was a war between neighbors (2005, p. 10): that the perpetrators (Shining Path, MRTA, and soldiers alike) were not extraterrestrials or imagined beings from another world, but rather products of the same society, and that they could well have been (or were) the neighbors, countrymen, classmates, or brothers of many Peruvians. This is perhaps the most powerful point of La hora final ; Gabriela, a police officer charged with capturing the terrorist leadership, is the sister of Fidel, a member of Shining Path, whom she tries to protect at any cost, even if it means putting her own mission at risk. Alexandra Hibbett (2018) has stated that one of Mendoza’s goals in making La hora final was to elaborate a story that would challenge the narrative of peacemaking imposed by Fujimorismo during the 1990s. Accordingly, Fujimori appropriates the triumph of the terrorists’ capture, when in reality this operation was carried out by a group of Special Intelligence police officers, in spite of a series of obstacles placed before them by their own government. Mendoza sought to pay homage through his film to the true architects of the capture of the Shining Path leader, not only showing the precarious conditions in which they carried out the operation, but also revealing what was at stake for them as individuals and their emotional bonds, such as Zambrano’s with his son and Gabriela’s with her brother. La hora final humanizes the heroes of the capture, as well as the villain (Fidel, Gabriela’s brother, the Shining Path militant). In this respect, Alexandra Hibbett has stated that La hora final : proposes a relatively complex view of the conflict’s actors, showing the agency of the victims, the humanity of the subversives, as well as how complex it is to separate them into two clearly opposing groups, in opposition to discourses that dehumanize the subversives and pose them as external enemies confronting innocent victims. (2018)

These protagonists are complex. Fidel is not an anonymous member of Shining Path, with no past, no family, no face, and no name. He is a person who blurs the dividing line between victim and victimizer, he is the son of a woman who disappeared as a result of the internal war. Gabriela is not the heroine of the Fujimorista savior narrative who follows orders without doubt or questioning, at any cost. Nor is she the passive victim caught in the crossfire—she has her own agency and she is placed at a crossroads where she makes her own decision.

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While speaking with Zambrano about the reasons why they are members of the Special Intelligence Group, Gabriela also calls into question the category of the terruco, putting herself in the place of those who choose that path due to the circumstances in which they happen to live. Zambrano tells her, “You talk like a terruca,” and Gabriela responds, “I could have been one.” Gabriela humanizes Fidel’s character through emotion: she embraces him, on the brink of rendering him vulnerable, but this breakdown lasts little more than a second. She evokes their land and their family, and she speaks to him in Quechua, appealing to their mother tongue in order to reactivate an emotional bond almost completely buried by the revolutionary cause. La hora final , as in La última tarde, centers around an ideological confrontation, but this one is much less complex. In La hora final, the subversive is a secondary character and his dramatic construction contains fewer nuances. However, the film takes the point of view of the police officers, and rather than being distanced in time, its plot develops in the midst of the war itself. Gabriela questions the nature of a revolution whose disastrous consequences fall precisely upon those it claims to protect, while Fidel perceives this cost as part of the social change for which he struggles: G: F: G:

You think what they’re doing is alright? It’s a process. And this is just another phase. A phase. How many people have to die in this phase? Our people too? Our mother?

In this dialogue, the complex limit between victim and perpetrator is blurred, since the opposing paths of both Fidel and Gabriela are products of the same war; their radically opposed paths in life are closely linked to the adversity and injustices they once shared. Despite the fact that the perspective of La hora final is that of the architects of Abimael Guzmán’s capture, the film manages to escape the common tropes of the heroic narrative, showing instead the vulnerability of its protagonists, Zambrano and Gabriela. In this way, the film succeeds in constructing an antagonist who is full of contradictions. Fidel is a member of Shining Path whose mother was murdered by Shining Path; while his character does not have the chance to make his case in sufficient depth, like Laura and Ramón in La última tarde, nor does Fidel lack emotional connections to a particular universe, anchored to specific geographies and class contexts. He is

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not the imagined being whose militancy in Shining Path can be explained only through madness or fanaticism; his justification is explained along with his life story and the circumstances of his past, finally allowing the viewer to see that Fidel is a product of the viewer’s own society.

Fiction Film Production and its Scope of Action Cultural production that portrays the figure of the “insurgent” with greater complexity is growing ever more common. Voices and narratives are emerging from literature and visual arts that are opening the way for more complex understandings of this subject of political action. Fiction cinema, nonetheless, has developed the subject relatively little in comparison to other spaces within the cultural industry. This circumstance is closely related to the particular conditions of the production and exhibition of this type of cinema, and to two factors specifically: production costs and the need to secure a minimum number of viewers for any film. The high production costs of a film that hopes to be released in commercial cinemas means that it is impossible to produce a film like this without the competitive public funding of the Ministry of Culture, international awards, and grants like IBERMEDIA, or loans and investments from the private sector. For documentary film producer Pablo Santur, cinematographic practice in Peru is in “permanent tension between creativity and commerce” (2015, p. 12). On the one hand, there is the director’s autonomy, and on the other, the profitability of a large-scale investment. Joel Calero won the Carolina Foundation11 grant in 2011 to write the screenplay of La última tarde, and in 2013 he won the DAFO prize for fiction feature film production. A year later, he was awarded funding from IBERMEDIA,12 and in 2016 he won the DAFO distribution prize again—a stimulus without which it would have been impossible to release the film in commercial cinemas. For his part, Eduardo Mendoza had a similar path: he won the DAFO development and distribution prizes, and he took out loans from three different banks in order to raise the $140,000 that allowed him to finish his film (Hibbett 2018, p. 3). In the context of a very limited market, even for commercial films, the 38,705 viewers who came to cinemas to watch La última tarde far exceeded the expectations of its director, Calero, just as the 224,361 who came to watch La hora final exceeded those of Mendoza, who had gone into debt in order to produce his film and only hoped to recover his investment.13

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In the case of cinema, investment, audience size, supply chains, and production timelines—as well as the number of institutions and individuals involved in a cinematographic project—are of much greater importance than in other areas of the cultural industries, such as literature and visual arts. Accordingly, the stakes of undertaking a cinematographic project are also much higher, and the scope of action for proposing an excessively transgressive narrative is much more reduced. It is noteworthy that both films were able to successfully put forth strategies for representing “insurgents” within this context of limitations. La última tarde turned out to be a pioneering fiction film that places the subversive as the main character, with their love story at the center of the narrative, while La hora final addresses the subject from the aesthetic of the detective thriller, placing the historical facts in the foreground and leaving the tensions derived from its personal stories in the background. Both films have been produced and released in a critical, polarized political context in which cultural production has constantly been in the eye of the storm. This fact, far from serving as a straitjacket, has given rise to the opportunity to put forth the complexities of the years of violence for debate and public reflection. In this context, it is undeniably necessary to begin confronting the voices of “the defeated” (Gálvez Olaechea 2015, p. 23).

Conclusion As was stated previously in the demarcation of the three distinct phases of the representation of the “insurgent” in Peruvian fiction cinema, the films that made a subject of the era of political violence in the first two phases reflected in little depth on the militants of the subversive organizations. Their representations lacked substance and density, and their characterizations typically fell into the common tropes and clichés of revolutionary discourse. This is owed, on the one hand, to the magnitude of the consequences produced by Shining Path during the internal armed conflict in Peru, to the lack of self-criticism among the subversives as a step toward repairing the torn social fabric, to the imaginary that has been built around the militant through hegemonic and public discourses of memory, and finally to the nature of cinematographic production and its particular limitations in Peru. In contrast, La última tarde and La hora final , as examples of the third phase, are two recent cinematographic productions that have succeeded, from different perspectives, in addressing the “insurgent” character with complexity.

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Both productions were released more than a decade after the publication of the Final Report of the CVR, at a post-conflict moment when some voices within cultural production were daring to cross through gray areas, contributing to the dismantling of certain prejudices and to the need to understand all the actors in the conflict, including those who opted to participate in the violence. While both films take place in distinct temporal settings, they coincide regarding the importance of recognizing the humanity of the “insurgents” as a first step toward understanding. These films outline the particular stories and circumstances of these characters as political subjects, with agency and contradictions, and from this starting point they question essentializing narratives, inviting viewers to reconsider the uncomfortable memories of the Peruvian internal war. This chapter was translated by Arthur Dixon.

Notes 1. The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR) refers to members of the subversive organizations as “insurgents,” or alzados en armas in Spanish. Since this is a quote from the Final Report, the term “insurgent” will appear in quotation marks throughout this chapter. 2. The Communist Party of Peru, known as Shining Path (PCP-SL, for its initials in Spanish) is a subversive terrorist organization that, in May of 1980, launched an armed conflict against the Peruvian state and civil society. The CVR has established that over the course of this conflict, the most violent in the history of the Republic of Peru, the PCP-SL committed heinous acts that constitute crimes against humanity, and was responsible for 54% of deaths reported to the CVR. 3. The Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA, for its initials in Spanish) was a Peruvian Marxist-Leninist subversive organization founded in 1984 and inspired by the leftist guerrilla movements of other countries in the region. The MRTA began its armed operations in July of 1985, and at present, its military capacities are dismantled. According to the Final Report of the CVR, the MRTA was responsible for 1.8% of deaths in the Peruvian internal armed conflict. 4. For more information and statistics regarding those affected by the violence, see the Conclusions of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. 5. For more information on the nature of the armed actors, see the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, pp. 23–98 (online).

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6. Terruco is a derogatory term used in Peru to refer to “terrorists,” members of subversive organizations such as Shining Path or the MRTA, or people with perceived connections to such groups. 7. Beginning in 1961, Adolf Eichmann was tried for committing genocide against the Jewish people during World War II. Hannah Arendt accepted the task of covering the trial as a New Yorker correspondent, and in 1963 she published the book Eichmann in Jerusalem. For Arendt, Eichmann was not a “monster” and his acts were not excusable, nor was he innocent. However, she argued, Eichmann did not act as he did because he was imbued with an immense capacity for cruelty, but rather because he was a bureaucrat, an operator within a system based on acts of extermination, and because he was an individual with very little capacity for reflection. 8. These stories can be found in Memorias de un soldado desconocido [Memories of an Unknown Soldier] by Lurgio Gavilán, about his time in Shining Path, the army, and the church; Los rendidos [The Surrendered] by José Carlos Agüero, son of Shining Path militants; and Con la palabra desarmada [With the Unarmed Word] by Alberto Gálvez Olaechea, a testimony and critical evaluation of his time in the MRTA. 9. In this study, Asencios reveals little-known aspects of the militants, such as, for example, the various aspects of day-to-day life within the organization. 10. Alias Alejandro (2005) was produced by Alejandro Cárdenas Camelio, son of a former leader of the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement. Sibila (2012) is a documentary produced by Teresa Arredondo, niece of Sybila Arredondo, who served fifteen years in prison for the crime of terrorism as a result of being linked to the self-proclaimed Communist Party of Peru–Shining Path (PCP-SL). 11. This is a Spanish joint foundation (public–private) for the promotion of cultural relations as well as educational and scientific cooperation between Spain and the other countries of the Iberoamerican Community. 12. IBERMEDIA is a private stimulus program for the coproduction of fiction and documentary films produced in Ibero-America, comprising twenty-one countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Chile, Ecuador, Spain, Guatemala, Italy, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Portugal, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Uruguay, and Venezuela. 13. Audience data cited from the Cinencuentro website: https://www.cinenc uentro.com/2017/12/27/mas-de-50-peliculas-peruanas-se-estrenaronel-2017/.

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Works Cited Agüero, J. C., 2015. Los rendidos: sobre el don de perdonar [The Surrendered]. Lima: Instituto de estudios peruanos. Agüero Solorzano J., 2017. Persona. Lima: FCE. Alias Alejandro, 2005. [film] Directed by Alejandro Cárdenas. Germany: Sabotage Films GmbH. Alias La Gringa, 1991. [film] Directed by Alberto Durant. Peru, Spain, Cuba, and UK: Channel Four Films, Instituto cubano de arte e industria cinematográficos, Perfo Studio, Televisión española. Arendt, H., 2003. Eichmann en Jerusalén. Barcelona: Lumen. Asencios, D., 2016. La ciudad acorralada. Jóvenes y Sendero Luminoso en Lima de los 80 y 90. Lima: IEP. Av. Larco [Larco Avenue], 2017. [film] Directed by Jorge Carmona. Peru: Tondero films. Bedoya, R., 2015. El cine peruano en tiempos digitales. Lima: Fondo editorial de la Universidad de Lima. Bernedo Morales, K., 2017. Post memoria y disidencia: dos experiencias del cine documental realizadas por parientes de militantes de Sendero Luminoso y el MRTA. In: L. Kogan, G. Pérez, L. Villa, eds. 2017. El Perú desde el cine, plano contra plano. Lima: Fondo editorial de la Universidad del Pacífico. pp. 77–86. Cabrera, D., 2004. Imaginario social, comunicación e identidad colectiva. Portal comunicación [online]. Available at: http://www.portalcomunicacion.com/ dialeg/paper/pdf/143_cabrera.pdf [Accessed 22 January 2019]. Calero, J., 2017. La última tarde: guión cinematográfico. Lima: Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas. Calero, J., 2019. Personal interview. 5 February 2019. Comisión de la Verdad y la Reconciliación (CVR), 2003. Informe final [PDF]. Available at: www.cverdad.org.pe [Accessed 15 January 2019]. Coraje [Courage], 1998. [film] Directed by Alberto Durant. Peru: Agua Dulce Films and Fernando Colomo producciones cinematográficas. Degregori, C., 2002. La década de la antipolítica: auge y huida de Alberto Fujimori y Vladimiro Montesinos. Lima: IEP. Durand A., 2005. Donde habita el olvido: los (h)usos de la memoria y la crisis del movimiento social en San Martín: memoria, política y movimientos sociales en la región San Martín (1985–2000). BA. Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos. Ferreira R., 2015. Cuatro películas peruanas frente a la violencia política: los casos de Lombardi, Eyde, Aguilar y Ortega. Revista de la Universidad de Lima [e-journal] 36. Available at: https://revistas.ulima.edu.pe/index.php/ lienzo/article/viewFile/488/461 [Accessed 7 February 2019]. Gálvez Olaechea, A., 2015. Con la palabra desarmada: ensayos sobre el (pos)conflicto [With the Unarmed Word]. Lima: Fauno ediciones.

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Gavilan Sánchez, L., 2013. Memorias de un soldado desconocido [Memories of an Unknown Soldier]. Lima: Instituto de estudios peruanos. Gonzales, Olga M., 2011. Unveiling Secrets of War in the Peruvian Andes. University of Chicago Press. Gutiérrez, G., 2015. La mirada negada: aproximaciones a la violencia y la etnicidad en el cine peruano: el caso de La boca del lobo, Paloma de papel y La teta asustada. Pacarina del Sur, 6 (22) [online]. Available at: [Accessed 9 January 2019]. Hibbett, A., 2018. La política de La hora final de Eduardo Mendoza. In: PUCP (Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú), Coloquio Internacional Memoria y Posmemoria: Argentina, Chile y Perú. Lima, Peru, 17–18 September 2018. Jelin E., 2002. Los trabajos de la memoria. Madrid: Siglo XXI. Jelin, E., 2014. Memoria y democracia: una relación incierta. Revista mexicana ciencias políticas y sociales [e-journal] 59(221). Available at: [Accessed 5 March 2019]. La boca del lobo [The Mouth of the Wolf], 1988. [film] Directed by Francisco J. Lombarid. Peru and Spain: Inca Film, New People´s Cinema, Tornasol Films, and Twinray. La casa rosada [The Pink House], 2018. [film] Directed by Palito Ortega Matute. Peru: Andina compañía cinematográfica, Peru Movie. La hora final [The Final Hour], 2018. [film] Directed by Eduardo Mendoza de Echave. Peru and Chile: La soga producciones. La última noticia [The Latest News], 2016. [film] Directed by Alejandro Legaspi. Peru: Grupo Chaski. La última tarde [The Last Afternoon], 2017. [film] Directed by Joel Calero. Peru: Factoría sur producciones. La vida es una sola [You Only Live Once], 1992. [film] Directed by Marianne Eyde. Peru: Kusi Films. Malek, P., 2016. Enfoques, discursos y memorias: producción documental sobre el conflicto armado interno en el Perú. Lima: Gato viejo grupo editorial. Milton, C. E. ed., 2014. Art from a Fractured Past: Memory and Truth Telling in Post Shining Path Peru. Durham: Duke Press. Milton, C. E. ed., 2018. El arte desde el pasado fracturado peruano. Lima: IEP. Paloma de papel [Paper Dove], 2003. [film] Directed by Fabrizio Aguilar. Peru: Luna Llena Films.

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Ritter, J., 2013. Cantos de sirena: ritual y revolución en los Andes peruanos. In: P. del Pino and C. Yezer, eds. 2013. Repensando la violencia: etnografía de Ayacucho pasado y presente. Lima: IEP. pp. 105–152. Santur, P., 2015. Impacto de la legislación cinematográfica peruana en la conformación de audiencias en las salas locales de cine comercial (1972–2013). Balance comparativo del decreto ley 19327 y la ley 26370. Infoartes [online]. Available at: [Accessed 9 March 2019]. Saona, M., 2017. Los mecanismos de la memoria. Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Sibila, 2012. [film] Directed by Teresa Arredondo. Peru, Chile, France, and Spain: Casimusicos cine, Fondo de formento audiovisual, and CORFO. Stern, S., 1999. Los senderos insólitos del Perú: guerra y sociedad, 1980–1995. Lima: Insituto de Estudios Peruanos-Universidad Nacional San Cristobal de Huamanga. Tarata, 2009. [film] Directed by Fabrizio Aguilar. Peru: Luna Llena Films. Theidon, K., 2005. Entre prójimos. Lima: IEP. Ulfe, M. E., 2011. Cajones de la memoria: la historia reciente del Perú en los retablos andinos. Lima: Fondo editorial de la PUCP. Vich, V., 2015. Poéticas del duelo, ensayos sobre arte, memoria y violencia política en el Perú. Lima: IEP. Vidas paralelas [Parallel Lives], 2005. [film] Directed by Rocío Lladó. Peru: J. C. Entertainment and Universidad alas peruanas.

PART II

OUTSIDE THE DYNAMICS OF THE MARKET

CHAPTER 15

No Concessions: Aesthetics and Politics in the Cinema of Eduardo Quispe Alarcón Cynthia Vich

One of the objectives of this book is to explore how neoliberalism, as the core cultural and political regime established in Peru since the early 1990s, has influenced the role played by Peruvian cinema in creating and disseminating national imaginaries and models of citizenship that circulate both locally and globally. Against this backdrop, and in the context of the erosion of the political (Rancière 1999, pp. 95–97) that characterized the turn between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, my purpose here is to critically examine the films and counter-hegemonic practices of production, distribution, and exhibition of Eduardo Quispe Alarcón, a main figure of Peruvian experimental cinema. Placing him within a historical and global tradition of anti-hegemonic artists that has shaped

I would like to thank Eduardo Quispe Alarcón for our many conversations, which were crucial for the writing of this essay. All translations of his words from Spanish are mine. C. Vich (B) Fordham University, New York, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 C. Vich and S. Barrow (eds.), Peruvian Cinema of the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52512-5_15

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his aesthetic, thematic, and anti-industrial choices, I put in dialogue his films, his production, distribution, and exhibition practices, his engagement with the local cinematic milieu, and his ideas about cinema as a political intervention. Consequently, one of the wider questions that I wish to address pertains to the role played by cinema—understanding it as a multifaceted cultural ecosystem composed of the actual media artifact and by the discourses and processes that surround it—in either reproducing or questioning the status quo. In light of the way that free-market principles have substantially redefined the cultural field in the late capitalist era, film scholars like Kapur and Wagner (2011) and Mazierska and Kristensen (2018) have studied the global filmmaking sector’s embrace of neoliberal ideology and practices, while Sandberg and Rocha (2018) have explored the particularities of the Latin American case. In particular, Sandberg has pointed out how since the early 1990s, privatization shifted a media landscape that until then had operated on regional and national levels and had been at least partially protected by the state, toward one of private entities strongly interested in transnational expansion (Mc Chesney, in Sandberg 2018, p. 6). Both in the commercial and the art film sectors, market driven logics have become the guiding principles of film production, distribution, and exhibition. Peru’s insertion into the global marketplace since the Fujimori government (1990–2000) resulted in cinema following this same model. The cuts to state funding implemented by the 1994 Cinema Law significantly reduced filmic production, prompting many filmmakers to insert themselves into the network of international film festival financing institutions (Barrow 2018, p. 29; Bedoya 2015, p. 54). Consequently, the technical standards and stylistic and thematic parameters of this global film market were imposed as necessary paths for success, especially for art films (Bedoya 2015, pp. 53, 61). In addition, the expansion of Peruvian consumer culture facilitated the emergence of privately owned and relatively successful commercial film companies with global models of style and genre for production, and standardized industrial systems for distribution and exhibition. In the face of both this commodification and internationalization, the digital revolution—also a feature of twenty-first-century neoliberalism— caused another sector of Peruvian film to move in the opposite direction, following a global alternative trend. By making it possible for filmmakers to carry out all aspects of production and postproduction independently without the financial support of private companies, state or international

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funding agencies, access to new technologies substantially democratized and de-centered Peruvian film production. Lima-based and regional independent commercial, art and experimental films blossomed, changing aesthetic parameters and allowing a diverse range of narrative structures and styles (Bedoya 2015, pp. 50, 73). Technological availability also triggered the growth of alternative circuits of exhibition both in Lima and throughout the country, breaking up—albeit on a limited scale—the monopoly of mainstream multiplex-model movie theaters. All this significant expansion and reconfiguration of the field of Peruvian cinema within the current global historico-political landscape provides the context for my discussion of Eduardo Quispe Alarcón’s work. Born in Ayacucho in 1980 but living in Lima from a very young age after his parents migrated to the capital, Quispe Alarcón practices what is known as guerrilla cinema1 ; an extremely low-budget, artisanal way of producing, distributing, and exhibiting film that fiercely locates itself outside and against market forces. Quispe Alarcón’s films do not have any financial support from private or state sources, do not regularly compete in film festivals, do not use professional actors, and are not shown in mainstream theaters. Since 2008, he has directed and produced six feature films sequentially named 1 (2008), 2 (2009), 3 (2010), 4 (2011), 5 (2014), and 6 (2016), all centered in exploring the lives of young second-generation Limeños of the early twenty-first century. These films are available online for free, but have also been exhibited in cultural centers, cineclubs and other non-commercial venues. An organizer of art and experimental film showcases since attending the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes in Lima where he trained as a video artist, Quispe Alarcón has collaborated on many projects—mostly small free film screening showcases2 —whose aim has been to develop an alternative Peruvian film culture in opposition both to the industrial model and to institutional state or public-private sources of film financing and exhibition, such as the yearly funding competitions organized first by CONACINE and then by DAFO,3 or the Festival de Cine de Lima. His objective has been to expand and update the field of Peruvian cinema by exposing spectators to both classic and current tendencies of international and local experimental films usually ignored by commercial venues and cultural private or state-sponsored institutions. These initiatives have also promoted alternative modes of film production, distribution, and exhibition.

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Independent Film: Making it Count Perhaps Quispe Alarcón’s most significant undertaking as a cultural agent was his role as one of the organizers of the 2009 Primera muestra de cine limeño, which in 2010 became the showcase Un nuevo cine peruano, and later evolved into the first edition of the Festival de Cine Lima Independiente in 2011. This festival contested the state funding competitions’ aesthetic and technical parameters and their “technocratic bureaucratization and homogenization of the creative process” (Radio Lima Gris 2015a) by presenting those Peruvian experimental films which did not adjust to such standards (Quispe Alarcón 2019) and which, therefore, had been rendered invisible. With avant-garde-inspired antagonism, the festival presented its films as enacting the concept of a “new Peruvian cinema”4 which was innovative, transgressive, marginal, and radically free of all those constraints that usually accompany the economic support of sources other than the artists themselves. If we understand the field of Peruvian film as “a space of positions and a space of position taking” where “permanent struggle” is a structuring principle (Bourdieu 1993, pp. 30, 34), we might acknowledge that in its constitution, Lima Independiente was taking possession of a specific form of capital—namely, what its organizers considered “authentic” independent filmmaking—that served to validate it as a significant player in the field. In addition to documenting and institutionalizing a distinct corpus of Peruvian cinema far beyond that which is governed by commercial aspirations or ambitions of artistic transnational success, Lima Independiente was the first local festival at the time to position itself in open contrast to the type of national film culture promoted by the Festival de Cine de Lima, Peru’s leading cinematic event.5 By 2011, this institution had already gathered significant regional and international prestige and had become a powerful local and regional arbiter and shaper of cinematic taste (Barrow 2016, pp. 133–134). Denouncing what it called the Festival de Cine de Lima’s auteurist and high culture principles, as well as its neoliberal public-private model of nation-building through cultural capitalism, Lima Independiente emerged as a dissenting space for developing an alternative Peruvian film culture, a political act aimed at breaking the homogeneity of the field’s status quo.6 This opening embraced radical artistic innovation and attempted to forge meaningful transnational dialogue with world cinema in quite a different manner from what was seen as the “decadent” internationalist profile of the Festival de

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Cine de Lima which, according to Quispe Alarcón (2019), was excessively centered on red carpets, prominent guests and vast press coverage. With a similar spirit to that of Humberto Solás’s Festival de Cine Pobre de Gibara, launched in opposition to Cuba’s main cinematic event (the Festival de Cine de La Habana),7 Lima Independiente sought to create an alternative circuit for low-budget cinema which rejected the need for expensive equipment and was not afraid of alienating audiences with its experimentation.8 As such, Lima Independiente might be read, with Rancière (1999), as the disruptive political appearance of that type of “surplus” cinematic production that was being left unaccounted for in the field of Peruvian cinema. In terms of mapping Quispe Alarcón’s position within this field, we need to consider his manifesto Qué es el cine independiente, published in 2011. In it, he highlighted what he believes are independent film’s fundamental ethical groundings: a practice of art-making that is only “indebted to itself,” that is, to its own desire to communicate and create human contact, and not to the logic of artistic or commercial success (Quispe Alarcón 2012). As he stated in that document: Beyond budgets, finances, formats, technology and technical issues, independence is to be autonomous, to make film less dependent on external tastes and demands, whether they are those of the public, of a certain type of festival, of the critics, and especially, to reject any concession to standardized, industrialized language. (Quispe Alarcón 2012)

With his refusal to join the ranks of mainstream global art filmmakers, and his firm reluctance to seek any funding for his films or to actively pursue them being featured in film festivals, Quispe Alarcón has resisted— with a few exceptions9 —those common practices that, according to Dudley Andrew, have significantly altered the very idea of “independent cinema” by having “independent” directors participate in “a fully global network that makes every film quite ‘dependent’” (2010, p. ix). As a self-proclaimed “film junkie” (Zunin 2015), Quispe Alarcón’s filmmaking practices are inspired by a wide range of artistic provocateurs from around the globe. Acknowledging his deep “ideological debt” to Jean Luc Godard, José Luis Guerín and Pedro Costa, his work and activism have also been significantly shaped by movements like Dogme 95, independent subgenres like American Mumblecore, and by the radical Latin American cult filmmaking icon Raúl Perrone from

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Argentina (Quispe Alarcón 2019). In addition, as I will develop further in the last section of this chapter, his understanding of cinema’s political role and the fusion of art and life that he proposes, echoes the militant ethos of the New Latin American Cinema (NLAC) movement of the 1960s and early 70s. In what follows, I will present how, while inscribing himself within an already established global tradition of artistic experimentation,10 Quispe Alarcón has creatively appropriated it by presenting a sincere take on his main subject: young second-generation Limeños of the early twenty-first century. Beyond the many influences that can be traced through his films, his main objective has been, first: to give cinematic life to a specific cohort that he believes has been ignored or superficially represented, and second: to provide a cinematic space where these young people might see themselves in the characters, the situations, and the natural, unscripted dialogues. In this sense, his films aim to transcend their dimensions as works of art, and rather wish to create a bond with specific spectators by exploring some aspects of their identities and relationships, and by critically engaging with their immediate socio-historical context. This is the result of an understanding of cinema not only as a means of representation, but as a larger project of political proportions meant to disrupt and enhance what Rancière conceptualized as the governing “regime of the perceptible” (1999, p. 102).

Against Artifice: Austere Production and Placing the Real into the Frame In tune with Dogme 95s founding principle of the need to purify filmmaking from the artificiality of technical manipulation and generic and narrative conventions in order to return to the fundamental “honesty” of the raw moving image (Kehr 2004), Quispe Alarcón aims to give back the power of cinematic production to the director as an artist. Consequently, he has rejected all those industrial corporate and marketing resources (high production values, sophisticated postproduction editing, elaborate and rigid scripts, and professional acting) that in his view, transform film into mere spectacle (Zunin 2015). This rejection is a core principle of much low-budget digital film production, a global phenomenon that has flourished in the last few decades thanks to the ever-increasing accessibility of technology. Within experimental filmmaking, low-budget digital film production has not only challenged established cinematic language and to a certain extent weakened the role

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of the most invasive capitalist elements of filmmaking; most importantly, it has democratized film production away from the colonizing effects of funding needs and production agents. Sometimes paying the price of low visibility and reduced audiences—something increasingly offset by internet streaming, as in Quispe Alarcón’s case—low-budget production has distanced filmmaking from one of its most persistent curses: its dependency on significant sums of money.11 Particularly in a country like Peru, where filmmaking used to be the privilege of the urban cosmopolitan elite, low-budget film production—apart from having been key in the development of regional commercial film—has enabled the flourishing of a wide variety of experimental projects by filmmakers from modest backgrounds, limited economic and professional means, and self-taught or alternative film instruction like Quispe Alarcón. In sum, in spite of persistent limitations, the profession of the filmmaker has been substantially democratized in the country. Quispe Alarcón’s films are exercises of aesthetic and technical austerity (resonant of neorealism) which aim to recover and convey the authenticity of spaces, dialogues, and human interactions. As he himself has remarked, the freedom brought by making film with whatever is at hand has an important effect on the filmmaker’s ability “to understand reality grounded in the perspective of those who live it, rather than from the gaze of the distant artist-observer” (Quispe Alarcón 2019). For example, in all six of his films, the absence of artificial lighting means that sometimes people and objects are hard to distinguish. Occasionally, unedited direct sound—like loud street traffic or the clicking of cups and saucers in a cafe, as in 1 (2008)—makes the characters’ conversations unintelligible. As a rejection of the intrinsic artificial nature of filmmaking, these formal choices are unavoidably romantic attempts to represent life in its most genuine form. Likewise, the use of one single shot to film the sixty-eight minute long 3 (2010) attempts to install the Deleuzian “time-image” of a city park into the frame, encouraging “a new way of seeing, one that is open to the capturing of mistakes, errors, and randomness of the reality being filmed” (Rombes 2009, p. 40). In sync with the contemplative principle of slow cinema, whose “direct presentations of time” (Deleuze, quoted in De Luca and Barradas Jorge 2016, p. 8) offer the spectator a different temporal relationship to perception, Quispe Alarcón believes that the long take reduces the spectators’ exposure to constant stimuli, becoming “an invitation to think about the image” (2019).12

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Quispe Alarcón has also been inspired by the so-called “digital socialism” of the American Mumblecore movement of the early 2000s (Naish 2013, pp. 43–47). Mumblecore had naturalism as its fundamental production ethos both in acting and in dialogue, and thus used no scripts or professional actors. Instead, improvisation was encouraged and dialogue was prioritized over plot, actors were willing friends, and locations were regular people’s apartments or non-iconic ordinary urban places. Rejecting “the cult of the director or producer,” Mumblecore incorporated a practice of collective creativity based on the horizontal collaboration of all those involved in making a movie (2013, pp. 43, 57).13 Following this spirit, the actors and crew of Quispe Alarcón’s films are also friends who have varying levels of professional training and who are not paid for their work. They are all recognized in final credits as part of a creative community: actors are not listed as cast but as filmmakers themselves (realizadores ); in 3, for example, the cameraman (Jim Marcelo Santiago) appears as co-director; and in 4 no director is acknowledged (Marcelo Santiago and Quispe Alarcón simply appear as producers). Still, in all six films, this type of collaborative production practice is nonetheless quite grounded on autorial structures of individual style, marking its difference with other forms of Peruvian collective filmmaking.14

A Critique of Operating Technologies of Power Thematically, if Mumblecore focused on a specific generation of Americans15 —those in their 20s and 30s at the beginning of the twenty-first century—Quispe Alarcón’s films explore the urban living and affective needs of second-generation Limeños whose origins can be traced to the massive migration of Peruvians to the capital city at different points of the twentieth century. His films’ portrayal of this specific social, cultural, and economic group focuses on how their interpersonal dynamics, psychological states, and romantic relationships, result in a particular way of inhabiting the city. By exploring the development of couples’ relationships under the specific frame of Limeño landscapes, Quispe Alarcón conceives and constructs urban experience as a way of inquiring into these young people’s lives in twenty-first-century neoliberal Peru. As he has stated, “all the suffering experienced in the relationship reflects, to a certain extent, the suffering experienced by the country […] I believe couples mirror cities” (Rojas 2014). The overarching critique of neoliberal rationality that connects Quispe Alarcón’s cultural agency, his aesthetics and his anti-industrial decisions,

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is also key to his thematic choices: his films denounce the effects of traditional capitalist and neoliberal technologies of power on human social behavior, showing how they function through modulating subjectivities “from below” as Gago (2017, p. 2) has argued.16 For example, several of his characters display the “intrinsic” entrepreneurial spirit of what Cánepa Koch (2013, p. 9), in line with current studies of technologies of citizenship and nation branding, refers to as “participatory subjects” who embody the way that neoliberalism’s performative order has redefined the concept of citizenship.17 Conceiving themselves as human capital, these Peruvians have internalized a normative force by which they hold themselves responsible for the efficient management of their lives.18 By representing them in his films, Quispe Alarcón condemns on screen, at the end of 6, the way neoliberal power, “having controlled a territory and its market, aspires to conquer minds, hearts and souls.” A few minutes into 3, for example, we find a young woman impatient with a romantic relationship that she considers a “waste” of her time because it obstructs her professional advancement. As she explains, the money that she could make in the future if she concentrated on her studies rather than on her romantic bond would allow her to “to advance” and so meet her mother’s demand to be the one to move the whole family further up economically. In her view, this potential achievement should not be risked for what she refers to as “a fleeting relationship.” This quantification of affective life, which establishes goals, designs strategies and manages resources following market metrics (Cánepa Koch 2013, p. 9) points to the dehumanizing and isolating effects of these young people’s embrace of the “entrepreneurial epic” (Cánepa Koch and Lossio Chávez 2019, p. 18) and their subsequent inability to give themselves to others without thinking of costs and benefits. In this young woman’s particular case, what her statements reveal is the juxtaposition of two regimes of subjugation: on one side, the Christian logic of debt that results from the sacrifice made by parents for the benefit of their children, and on the other, the traditional capitalist and neoliberal technologies of power which demand the individual’s performance as a fully productive subject. As a further expansion and transformation of capitalist biopolitics, what Han (2017) has conceptualized as “psychopolitics” operates by taking control of the individuals’ psyche, engineering and steering the subject’s wishes and needs from within. As Han has stated, following Deleuze, if the biopolitical regime imposed repressive control over the body, the neoliberal regime, as a step further, is a psychopolitical one that operates

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“like a soul” exploiting the individual’s freedom (2017, p. 15, 18). In this context, and via characters like the one presented above, Quispe Alarcón depicts the demand that these enslaved subjects exert on themselves: the mandate for compulsive achievement is here combined with the obligation to respond appropriately to the opportunities given by migrant parents. As a critique of this logic of subjugation, Quispe Alarcón wants to show the truth that he believes lies below these subjects’ performative discourse: loneliness and human disconnection. In his films, many of these young Limeños appear isolated, drifting through an urban space that is filmically constructed as an extension of their own uncertainties, unrest, and emotional wanderings (Bedoya 2015, pp. 193–194). Ideologically, this representation connects with the long tradition of Marxist critique that understands isolation and alienation as the fundamental traits of social life under capitalism. In that vein, fragmentation—both as a fundamental social condition of life under late capitalism, and as the essence of Quispe Alarcón’s own realist aesthetic—is the overarching principle of his work.

Fragmentation as Structuring Principle Thematically, the conversion of contemporary urban fragmentation into a logic for social bonds appears in Quispe Alarcón’s films as a recurrent motif: young couples’ persistent inability to sustain a fluid and continuous romantic relationship. This affective fragility is symbolized in the tension and the discomfort felt at the same time by characters and spectators in response to the erratic, intermittent and inconclusive conversations that compose the “action” of all his films. In the street scenes of 1, for example, the chosen location (the plaza outside a 1970s Brutalist state building), the position and gestures of unease of the characters’ bodies, the male protagonist’s inability to keep the conversation flowing, and the constantly elusive look of his girlfriend, point out to an impending breakup for which the location’s symbolic power appears as a metaphor: the dehumanizing nature of Brutalism’s urban rationality and its failure to harbor human sociability becomes the spatial manifestation of the couple’s inability to communicate (Fig. 15.1). In addition, in 2 (2009) we see the male protagonist unsuccessfully trying to establish a steady romantic relationship with a woman who ignores him and expresses her endemic cynicism toward this type of bond. As a result, he is mostly seen aimlessly walking the streets or passively lying in bed. At the aesthetic level, fragmentation is also the guiding structure

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Fig. 15.1 Protagonist couple of 1 (Quispe Alarcón 2008) having an awkward silence during their conversation in front of the Centro Cívico building, in Lima’s downtown

in 2, where social gatherings are filmed from extremely low-angle point of view shots that fragment bodies and objects, and where the narrative flow is repeatedly interrupted by cuts to black screens. Furthermore, in all six films, disaffection both in human relationships and in the individuals’ connection to the city is effectively transmitted through high levels of abstraction resulting from extreme close-ups on objects and body parts. Fragmentation as a structuring principle also affects the compositional unity of some of the films. The main body of 5 (2014), for example, is framed by a prologue and an epilogue that thematically have no apparent connection with the rest of the film. They appear as leftovers of an earlier recording over which new material has been filmed: blue screens that look like “tracking” jump cuts make up the transitions between the main body of the film and these frames.19 This technique, nowadays widely used in experimental film, intends to reproduce the feeling of a home video filmed on a previously used cassette tape. By using it, Quispe Alarcón intends to show how chance can spontaneously “edit” a film, creating an unexpected “story” (Rojas 2014). In this sense, fragmentation becomes an alternative way of composing a narrative. This approach culminates in 6, where an even more radical dismissal of compositional unity occurs,

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and different filmic languages are combined. 6 is the residue of several failed film projects: they all appear as fragments or ruins of absent movies that never came to be. After an initial shot that apparently has no connection to what follows—a scene where Quispe Alarcón gives instructions to the cameraman—the first thirty-two minutes of the film tell the story of a couple made up of two young women who aspire, but are ultimately unable, to make a film. Then, for the next seventy minutes, 6 becomes a manifesto-type film essay where, in pseudo-documentary style and amidst footage of failed filming and shots of the storyboard, Limeño landscapes, and urban events, Quispe Alarcón tells the frustrating story of how his original idea of a film about the difficulties of making independent cinema in Peru became just that due to the precarity of resources and the never-ending obstacles. When volunteer actors left the project for other commitments or when locations became unavailable, the “plots” and structure of 6 had to be changed repeatedly. In sum, the film’s fragmentation at various levels became not so much the result of an artistic decision, but a reality check of the all-embracing precarity that this type of independent filmmaking in Peru has to face.20

Human Emancipation as the Political Role of Film Toward the end of 6, after he and other directors lament the hardships of Peruvian independent filmmaking, Quispe Alarcón poignantly reflects on the isolating effects of sticking to his principles of a “poor” cinema of radical freedom. With stoic frustration, he alludes to the prophetic irony of his initial idea for the film, and states: “And finally, here I am alone […] filming myself.” The scene’s existential solipsism is accentuated by the reverse shot of the tripod-held camera shooting him among the solitude of the room, as if stating that his work has no place in the current field of Peruvian cinema (Fig. 15.2). Still, in spite of this somber call to consider the limits of the filmmaking model he proposes, 6 is the persistent affirmation of Quispe Alarcón’s unyielding advocacy for the ethical and aesthetic principles that guide his understanding of the role of cinema. Firmly calling for that fusion of art and life that distinguishes him from other Peruvian directors, his antagonistic filmmaking choices express his stance against art conceived either as part of a cultural industry, as a merely contemplative elitist activity, or as a commodity responding to individual interests and benefits. As he mentions halfway through the film:

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Fig. 15.2 Reverse shot of the camera while filming 6 (Quispe Alarcón 2016)

For me, film is transversal, that is, it encompasses all aspects of our lives. Not only is it our way of making a living, of earning some money, of socially stratifying ourselves, of looking for recognition; it is transversal. That is, every molecule of oxygen in our body relates to film, every way of doing things is cinematic, every viewpoint, every word, every position we take is a form of activism, isn’t it? And it’s a little outrageous that when we talk about cinema in Peru we talk about marketing, advertising campaigns, economic advantage, etc. For me, that is absurd.

The demanding moral position that these words imply brings to mind the ideological foundations of the NLAC movement and its ideals of absolute coherence between art and life. Addressing issues of neocolonialism, poverty and underdevelopment, NLAC filmmakers understood material constraints as a catalyst for artistic experimentation and conceived cinematic praxis as a tool for social and political change (Burucúa and Sitnisky 2018, p. 2). Quispe Alarcón’s convictions echo NLAC’s idealism, its decolonizing “mission,” its desire to transform habits of spectatorship, and its call for politically committed artists and intellectuals. Nevertheless, both his films’ aesthetics and his ideas about cinema’s role are quite distant from this group’s Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy and from its continental collective project of political uprising. From an Anarchist rather than a Marxist perspective, Quispe Alarcón takes from Grupo Liberación’s

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“Third Cinema” (1969), Julio García Espinosa’s “Imperfect Cinema” (1969), and Glauber Rocha’s “Aesthetics of Hunger” (1965) their belief in a much needed “decolonization of culture” (Getino and Solanas 1969a, b, p. 37) that liberates the spectator from the banality of commercial cinema and from auteur film’s structures of dependency and elitist limitations. His understanding of liberation, though, is far from the revolutionary radicalism and the ardent belief in the historical protagonism of the “masses” professed by NLAC filmmakers. For example, in contrast to the passionate and direct call to political activism that the highly successful and recently released La revolución y la tierra (2019) makes on Peruvian spectators—in a tone much closer to that of NLAC documentaries— for Quispe Alarcón, cinema’s role is to restore individual autonomy in its most essential sense, freeing individuals from neoliberal mandates through cinematic experiences that break up their passivity as spectators, challenge their imagination, and allow them to critically see themselves on screen. In his view, this process has the potential to re-humanize audiences and trigger a socially and politically engaged citizenship. Quispe Alarcón’s understanding of the political dimension of cinema echoes Imperfect Cinema’s principle that art should be a radically disinterested activity fully accessible for everyone to produce and to be exposed to (Velleggia 2009, pp. 226–227). Rather than the task of “illuminated artists” or “specialists,” he believes cinema should be an integral part of human beings’ lives, a tool to fight alienation and dehumanization. At the same time, far from the clandestine and radical political instrumentalization of NLAC’s concept and practice of “cine-acto”,21 but still close to its understanding of cinema as a politically transformative experience, Quispe Alarcón advocates for breaking up the barriers between filmmaker and spectator. However, he believes this should not be achieved by developing a “cinema of the masses”,22 but by calling on the state’s obligation to facilitate culture as a public service. He demands the state to discard its current operating principle of economic sustainability for matters of cultural promotion, and instead focus on developing art’s potential to strengthen the country’s social fabric (Quispe Alarcón 2019). To put this in practice at the level of film production, Quispe Alarcón believes it is essential to democratize who can become a filmmaker in Peru and how filmmaking is done. He argues for the state’s creation and funding of public and economically accessible film schools that would stand as alternatives to the purely technical and market-oriented private film schools and university communications departments that have flourished mostly

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in Lima in the last two decades. With Humanities-focused curricula, these schools would not only allow directors and film scholars from diverse geographical, cultural, and economic backgrounds to develop; they would also promote a different understanding and practice of cinema as an art form inherently linked to exploring the circumstances, the needs, and the problems of Peruvians (Radio Lima Gris 2018). Realizing that this is quite an ambitious goal considering the limited political will of the Peruvian state to support cinema, Quispe Alarcón calls on Peruvians’ resourcefulness by stating that nowadays, anyone with a true passion for cinema and an authentic interest to learn from its history can become a filmmaker without the need for expensive education or equipment. As happened in his case, the vast resources currently available through the internet provide a valuable tool to surpass economic and educational limitations (2019). At the level of exhibition, if creating national audiences for a cinema of artistic value and social engagement is nowadays quite a challenge in Peru as it is elsewhere, for Quispe Alarcón this can be achieved by transforming the very nature of what is understood as the experience of watching a film. In what appears unusual coming from a self-identified Anarchist, he calls once again on the state to play a stronger role working together with artists to create programs intended to re-humanize and re-politicize Peruvian audiences. In his view, this could be done by significantly expanding and financing community-building film-viewing public screenings and discussions that prioritize direct contact and dialogue between filmmakers and audiences (Radio Lima Gris 2015b).23 He contends that the type of conversations that naturally develop in these events reinforce what he believes is cinema’s crucial role: to trigger people’s interest in exploring their own subjectivity and that of others, to awaken their political conscience, and to bring people together in a way that encourages a communal sense of belonging (Radio Lima Gris 2018). For Quispe Alarcón, it is not a matter of understanding cinema as an object of cult or erudite value that needs to be paternalistically “decoded” for an uneducated public. It is rather about opening up opportunities for regular people to be exposed to an audiovisual experience that stimulates their aesthetic sensibility, fosters their critical thinking, and connects with them through real-life situations and characters. As an alternative to the neoliberal model of experiencing cinema in isolation as a commodity, Quispe Alarcón believes that these cinematic events are opportunities for

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Peruvians to connect, relate, and empathize with each other through discussions about film. From a critical standpoint, several considerations of Quispe Alarcón’s inspiring ideals and artistic practices need to be taken into account. The first is to acknowledge the significant difficulties of reconciling some of the most radical artistically experimental elements of his aesthetics with his desire to connect with average people in a non-erudite form. While his films do capture and portray real-life circumstances and genuine, non-artificial characters capable of interpellating and affectively connecting with a specifically differentiated local—and potentially international—audience (urban middle-class youth), their abstraction, fragmented composition, elliptical narratives and slow temporal unfolding can be difficult for many to undergo. In this sense, at a practical level, the way his films aesthetically embody his theoretical pronouncements can certainly interfere with his convictions about the need to bridge the gap with his spectator. Inevitably, films like Quispe Alarcón’s are mostly seen by small audiences accustomed to cinematic experimentalism. In this sense, his belief in art or independent film’s potential for social impact cannot avoid what Rancière described as “the aesthetic cut that separates outcomes from intentions” (2009, p. 82). In addition, history has shown us that much of the fresh radicalism of provocateur artists like those that inspire Quispe Alarcón’s work has faded, having been co-opted by mainstream consumer-oriented filmmaking and even by mainstream media/video platforms. By contrast, until now Quispe Alarcón has remained fervently coherent and committed to his principles of a fiercely autonomous low-budget practice, but for this he has paid a price. As shown in 6, his ability to continue making film is limited and exhausting. Moreover, his refusal to seek state or private funding, to accept the conditions of mainstream venues to screen his films, and to regularly participate in film festivals, has significantly reduced the visibility of his work and his capacity to reach a wider audience. In this respect, he has stated that he is not interested in promoting a successful career, but rather in offering his films as opportunities for artistic, personal, and communal exploration. He believes that, whoever has an authentic desire to explore cinema on these terms can find his films in alternative screening circuits or online (Quispe Alarcón 2019). However, what solitary online viewing does not fully allow is precisely that shared space for human encounter and collective discussion that he himself advocates is essential for advancing a sense of community and

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citizenship. Furthermore, any consideration of the political potential of cinema needs to address the limited relevance, particularly of independent or art film, as mediums through which collective imaginaries can be developed. If at certain points in the history of Latin American cinema, film had the ability to consolidate feelings of national kinship through the shared viewing habits of domestic audiences24 (Poblete 2018, pp. 17– 18, 21), it was in fact commercial films “for-the-masses” where this was achieved.25 Beyond these considerations, I contend that within the field of Peruvian cinema, Quispe Alarcón’s films and cinematic practices have played a substantial role. Thematically, his highly specific generational portrait, together with his understanding of the everyday as both a critical and aesthetic category (Crary, quoted in De Luca and Barradas Jorge 2016, p. 15) follow the spirit of Rancière’s claim around the issue of aesthetic worthiness, reconfiguring who (and how) is worthy of being shown onscreen (De Luca and Barradas Jorge 2016, p. 14). In sharp contrast to how many Peruvian films of the last two decades have represented young Limeños of migrant origins as emblems of the neoliberal model, Quispe Alarcón’s critical exploration of their sociability, their romantic endeavours, their relationship with the urban fabric, and the societal and familial pressures they face, provides an alternative and complex portrait of this particular cohort. Finally, it is certainly inspiring to see how Quispe Alarcón’s stance in favor of posing a political and aesthetic challenge to the spectator as a human being and as a citizen remains firm; as well as his commitment to an alternative way of producing, distributing and exhibiting films. By refusing to make concessions to a consumer culture that for him has coopted much of the world, he continues to insist on the liberating power of cinema as an art form, and as such, demands that it should be a vehicle of inquiry, resistance, and rehumanization. His faith that film, like all art, “when it is free, frees, when it is independent, brings about independence” (Radio Lima Gris 2018) remains untouched. Understanding the camera neither “as a rifle” nor as an “author’s pen,” but rather as a tool toward human emancipation and political engagement, the following words at the end of 6 summarize his position. Cinema is not made by filmmakers, nor by businesses, nor by advertising agencies, nor by production companies. Cinema is not made with money, but with ideas, with soul. Because it is an art and it needs to be human.

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In sum, with respect to the position and role of cinema in society, Quispe Alarcón’s most valuable contribution to a field that is structurally defined—and fractured—by neoliberal commodification, is his attempt to restore cinema as “a specific mode of human being-together” (Rancière 1999, p. 101) which triggers spectators to think critically beyond themselves.

Notes 1. This term was widely used within the New Latin American Cinema (NLAC) movement, particularly to refer to the role of cinema as an aggressive agent of political liberation whose precarious means of operation and perilous attitude—similar to that of the guerrilla soldier—were its tools for attacking the system (Getino and Solanas 1969a, b). Over time, the term has been loosely used to refer to its anti-institutional nature, its precarious means, and its rejection of market forces. 2. For example, he collaborated on several film series at the now defunct Cine Club Cayetano Heredia, and organized the Ciclo Influencias (available for viewing on social media) at the Centro Cultural Olaya. One of his many future projects is a weekly online free program of live interaction with the public, where the discussion of a particular film would serve as the starting point for a wider analysis combining aesthetic, political, economic and socio-cultural issues (Quispe Alarcón 2019). 3. These are the subsequent names of the offices in charge of supporting film and audiovisual projects within Peru’s Ministry of Culture. CONACINE stands for the Consejo Nacional de Cinematografía [National Cinema Council] and DAFO stands for the Dirección del Audiovisual, la Fonografía y los Nuevos Medios [Directorate of Audiovisual, Sound Production, and New Media]. 4. This phrase inevitably reveals a desire to establish a link with the Nuevo cine argentino of the late 1990s in terms of the production practices and diverse set of experimental aesthetics of its filmmakers. In my view, though, the wider scope of the innovations and the continental influence of the Argentinian movement is hardly comparable with the Peruvian independent film of the early 2000s. 5. For an in-depth study of this festival’s role in the national, regional and international cinema landscape, see Barrow (2016). 6. Isabel Seguí’s chapter in this volume also refers to the way that other small, local independent film festivals like Lima Independiente have enhanced the Peruvian cinematic field.

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7. The guiding principles of Solás’ project are explained on his Manifiesto del cine pobre, accessible at . 8. Unfortunately, this festival ceased in June 2019. 9. In 2014, 5 was presented at the Transcinema Festival Internacional de Cine, where it won an award, and in 2019, 6 was presented at the Festival Internacional de Cine de Viña del Mar. 10. Following Eco, Tompkins (2013, p. 2) states that in experimental film, innovation and critique occur from within an established tradition. 11. In spite of this, economic factors still have a notable influence on someone’s capacity to make a film, as Quispe Alarcón himself makes explicit in 6. 12. For a thorough discussion of the main characteristics of “slow cinema”, see De Luca and Barradas Jorge (2016). 13. Mumblecore started with Andrew Bujalski’s film Funny Ha Ha (2002) and ended around 2010 when the core directors and actors transitioned to more mainstream big budget productions. 14. Among many others, a quite different model of Peruvian collective filmmaking is the work done by the Escuela de Cine Amazónico, discussed by Claudia Arteaga in Chapter 16 of this volume. 15. In addition to Mumblecore, the work of other filmmakers who focus on generational portraits like Godard, Rohmer, and especially Perrone—who portrays the marginal youth of his hometown, Ituzaingó—has deeply inspired Quispe Alarcón’s work. 16. Gago’s concept of “neoliberalism from below” emphasizes how neoliberal rationality “is not purely abstract nor macropolitical, but arises from the encounter with forces at work and is embodied in various ways by the subjectivities and tactics of everyday life, as a variety of ways of doing, being and thinking that organize the social machinery’s calculations and affects” (2017, p. 2). While “neoliberalism from below” is an ample concept encompassing the multiple and heterogeneous ways in which neoliberal rationality is simultaneously enacted, contested and reinterpreted by subjects with different levels of agency in different spheres of their daily lives, the character of Quispe Alarcón’s 3 that I discuss in this section embodies how neoliberal rationality has become deeply rooted in popular subjectivities by conquering the psyche, and in this particular case, by directing affective life. 17. In Peruvian commercial cinema, an emblem of this type of “participatory subject” can be found in the protagonist of the ¡Asu mare! films. 18. As Cánepa Koch and Lossio Chávez (2019, p. 13) have further explained when discussing Marca Perú from a Foucauldian perspective, the mandate of this power device calls for Peruvian citizens to “live the brand”. 19. This also happens in 4, although that film has no prologue or epilogue.

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20. It is interesting to realize that this precarity is not exclusive to experimental cinema: as Martha Dietrich shows in her chapter in this volume, the same thing occurs in regional commercial filmmaking. A point of contact is then established between substantially different filmmaking practices like Quispe Alarcón’s and Ccorahua and Berrocal’s in terms of the arduous obstacles faced to complete their films. 21. Getino and Solanas defined this concept by which a film projection was transformed into a political act which, in their view, liberated a territory and transformed its people thanks to the participation of “the masses” who, from being simple spectators, became actors by participating in post-screening debates. For more on “cine-acto”, see Getino and Solanas (1969a, b, pp. 55–57). 22. Other Peruvian film projects like Chaski’s Microcines, Docuperú or the previously mentioned Escuela de Cine Amazónico, can be seen as being more directly inspired on this political objective. For example, in contrast to Quispe Alarcón’s strict “no concessions” stance, Microcines has a more flexible approach to making cinema an influential tool for many of the same objectives that he avows. For a thorough analysis of the Microcines project, see McClennen (2011) and Ross (2010). 23. Some of these have already been held by grassroots organizations, academic institutions and even by corporations: examples are the screenings, discussions and workshops led by film critic Mónica Delgado at the former Cineclub de la Universidad Ciencias y Humanidades, or those at Espacio Fundación Telefónica. Most recently, there has been an upsurge of these type of public engagements in online cineclubs, forums and coverage of local festivals as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. 24. It should be noted that La revolución y la tierra, a documentary that has gathered unprecedented acclaim and record numbers among Peruvian audiences, with sold-out shows has, to a small extent, made a step in this direction. 25. One of the few instances when this was possible was during the classic Golden Age of Latin American cinema in Mexico, Argentina and Brazil between 1930 and 1950. For more on this, see Poblete (2018).

Works Cited 1, 2008. [film] Directed by Eduardo Quispe Alarcón. Peru: Cinestesia. 2, 2009. [film] Directed by Eduardo Quispe Alarcón. Peru: Cinestesia. 3, 2010. [film] Directed by Eduardo Quispe Alarcón, Jim Marcelo Santiago. Peru: Cinestesia and Proyecto lado B. 4, 2011. [film] Made by Eduardo Quispe Alarcón and Jim Marcelo Santiago. Peru: Cinestesia.

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5, 2014. [film] Directed by Eduardo Quispe Alarcón. Peru: Production company not provided. 6, 2016. [film] Directed by Eduardo Quispe Alarcón. Peru: Production company not provided. Andrew, D., 2010. Foreword. In: R. Galt and K. Schoonover, eds. 2010. Global Art Cinema. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. v–xi Barrow, S., 2016. Constraints and Possibilities: Lima Film Festival, Politics and Culture Formation in Peru. New Review of Film and Television Studies, 14(1), pp. 132–148. Barrow, S., 2018. Contemporary Peruvian Cinema: History, Identity and Violence on Screen. London: I. B. Tauris. Bedoya, R., 2015. El cine peruano en tiempos digitales. Lima: Universidad de Lima, Fondo Editorial. Bourdieu, P., 1993. The Field of Cultural Production. Essays on Art and Literature. Edited and introduced by R. Johnson. New York: Columbia University Press. Burucúa, C. and Sitnisky, C., 2018. The Precarious in the Cinema of the Americas. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Cánepa Koch, G., 2013. Nation Branding: The Re-foundation of Community, Citizenship and the State in the Context of Neoliberalism in Peru. Medien Journal, 3, pp. 7–18. Cánepa Koch, G. and Lossio Chávez, F., 2019. La marca país como campo argumentativo y los desafíos de problematizar al Perú como marca. In: G. Cánepa and F. Lossio Chávez, eds. 2019. La nación celebrada: marca país y ciudadanías en disputa. Lima: Universidad del Pacífico y Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. pp. 9–39. De Luca, T. and Barradas Jorge, N. Eds., 2016. Slow Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Funny Ha Ha, 2002. [film] Directed by Andrew Bujalski. USA: Goodbye Cruel Releasing. Gago, V., 2017. Neoliberalism from Below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economies. Durham: Duke University Press. Getino, O. and Solanas, F., 1969a. Hacia un tercer cine: Apuntes y experiencias para el desarrollo de un cine de liberación en el tercer mundo [pdf]. Available at: [Accessed 20 April 2019]. Getino, O. and Solanas, F., 1969b. Towards a Third Cinema. Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World. In: M. Martin, ed. 1997. New Latin American Cinema. Volume One, Theory, Practices and Transcontinental Articulations. Detroit: Wayne University Press. pp. 33–58.

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Han, B.-Ch., 2017. Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. Translated from German by Erik Butler. New York: Verso. Kapur, J. and Wagner, K. eds., 2011. Neoliberalism and Global Cinemas: Capital, Culture and Marxist Critique. London: Routledge. Kehr, D., 2004. Dogme: Still Strong, but Less Dogmatic. The New York Times [online] 21 March. Available at: [Accessed 20 April 2019]. La revolución y la tierra, 2019. [film] Directed by Gonzalo Benavente Secco. Peru: Animalita, Autocinema Films, and Bebeto Films. Martin, M. ed., 1997. New Latin American Cinema. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Mazierska, E. and Kristensen, L. eds., 2018. Contemporary Cinema and Neoliberal Ideology. New York: Routledge. McClennen, S. 2011. Politics and Privatization in Peruvian Cinema: Grupo Chaski’s Aesthetics of Survival. In: J. Kapur and K. Wagner, eds. 2011. Neoliberalism and Global Cinema: Capital, Culture and Marxist Critique. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 95–112. Naish, S., 2013. U.ESS.AY: Politics and Humanity in American Film. Winchester, UK; Washington, DC: Zero Books. Poblete, J., 2018. National Cinema. In: M. D’Lugo, A.M. López, and L. Podalsky, eds. 2018. The Routledge Companion to Latin American Cinema. New York: Routledge. pp. 17–30. Quispe Alarcón, E., 2012. Manifiesto: ¿Qué es el cine independiente? [online]. Available at: [Accessed 20 April 2019]. Quispe Alarcón, E., 2019. Personal Communication, January 20, 2019. Radio Lima Gris, 2015a. Eduardo Quispe: “No hago cine marginal, pero sí documento la marginalidad espiritual”. La cinefilia no es patriota. Programa 19 [podcast] 12 July 2015. Available at: [Accessed 20 April 2019]. Radio Lima Gris, 2015b. Entre la gente de cine hay mucho egoísmo. La cinefilia no es patriota. Programa 32 [podcast] 21 October 2015. Available at: [Accessed 20 April 2019]. Radio Lima Gris, 2018. Cine y comunidad: con Mario Castro Cobos y Eduardo Quispe Alarcó [video online]. Available at: [Accessed 20 April 2019]. Rancière, J. 1999. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Rancière, J. 2009. The Emancipated Spectator. London and New York: Verso. Rojas, L., 2014. Festival Transcinema 2014: 5 de Eduardo Quispe. Antes del atardecer limeño. Cinencuentro [online] 26 October. Available at: [Accessed 20 April 2019]. Rombes, N., 2009. Cinema in the Digital Age. London: Wallflower Press. Ross, M., 2010. South American Cinematic Culture: Policy, Production, Distribution and Exhibition. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Sandberg, C., 2018. Contemporary Latin American Cinema and Resistance to Neoliberalism: Mapping the Field. In: C. Sandberg and C. Rocha, eds. 2018. Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Resisting Neoliberalism. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 1–23. Sandberg, C. and Rocha, C., eds., 2018. Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Resisting Neoliberalism. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Tompkins, C., 2013. Experimental Latin American Cinema: History and Aesthetics. Austin: University of Texas Press. Velleggia, S., 2009. La máquina de la mirada: los movimientos cinematográficos de ruptura y el cine latinoamericano. Buenos Aires: Altamira. Zunin, E., 2015. ¿Qué es el cine independiente?: una conversación con Eduardo Quispe. Projectil Lima Z, [blog] 30 June. Available at: [Accessed 20 April 2019].

CHAPTER 16

“Toward a Cinema for Life”: The Activism of the Escuela de Cine Amazónico Claudia Arteaga

The Escuela de Cine Amazónico (ECA) (Amazonian Film School) was founded in the city of Pucallpa in the Amazonian region of Ucayali in 2013, thanks to an alliance of representatives of various independent businesses: Fernando Valdivia Gómez, documentary filmmaker and founder of Teleandes producciones, from Lima; Carlos Marín, filmmaker and head of the Cayumba Cine Production Company, from Tingo María; and Kathy Quio, activist and founder of Jóvenes Promotores en Derechos Humanos (Young Promoters of Human Rights), from Pucallpa.1 This school is much more than an audiovisual training center. Valdivia (2019), its current director, defines it as an independent cultural space for community gathering, collaboration, and management, operating in the areas of education, production, and dissemination of films made by residents of the Amazonian region. According to Valdivia, the ECA proposes to foster an “audiovisual activism” able to “make visible, inform about, and raise awareness of contemporary Amazonian socio-environmental issues that

C. Arteaga (B) Scripps College, Claremont, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 C. Vich and S. Barrow (eds.), Peruvian Cinema of the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52512-5_16

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require attention, debate, and mobilization” (2017, pp. 5–6). Through an examination of the ECA’s pedagogy and its conditions of production and reception, as well as the representational regimes of two short films produced by the school, Anhelos de mujer [Women’s Longing] (2014) and Ritual Yanesha para convertirse en mujer [Yanesha Ritual to Become a Woman] (2017), this chapter studies the politics of this form of audiovisual activism. My questions are: What is the political action it proposes? How is this action offered as an alternative to the Peruvian imaginary surrounding Amazonia, forged as a function of a long history of coloniality and colonization of the image? What notion of the political is called for by this cinematographic work, both on- and off-screen? What is its audience? How does this activism respond concretely to the times, desires, and organizing methods of the indigenous peoples of Amazonia? Facing a long-lasting precariousness that has affected Amazonia for generations, I propose that the ECA’s political action is manifested in two ways. On the one hand, following an idea of film as representation, its action lies in counteracting visions that are exoticist, colonial, or reliant on the spectacle of the destruction of the oppressed, proposing place based and concrete perspectives of internal social relationships, specifically those associated with gender and traditions. As we will see in the analysis of the two documentaries, the ECA’s representations reflect on community formation, serving as expressions of a small-scale politics that, in the context of the Peruvian imaginary, proposes to transform perceptions of life in the rainforest. On the other hand, with regard to film as a social act emerging both during and after the creation of the audiovisual image, the ECA’s work consists of managing spaces for dissemination, forging the idea of a cinema for the rainforest that is accessible and relevant, most importantly, to the realities that shape it. Considering this double-sided action, in the social field and in the field of representation, I maintain that the school facilitates the construction of “micropolitical spheres.” With this concept, freely adopted from Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (cited in Barber 2019), I argue that the school’s cinematographic activity proposes reflection on the formation of community from both within and beyond the image. My study privileges the local environments that are constituted through their representation, based on conversations and negotiations between Amazonian sectors of distinct origins that are excluded in distinct ways from public platforms originating from the capital city. I also show that the ECA’s political work consists of facilitating conditions for group formation, deliberation, and

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self-management in the production and dissemination of the audiovisual image, such that “one can become visible to oneself” (Schiwy 2014, p. 161) and, through the community, to others. By putting forth localized forms of producing meaning and alternative imaginaries, the ECA sets its own course within the spectrum of proposals that characterize contemporary Peruvian film. Due to its local sphere of action and its nature as a non-professional cinema of “imperfect” aesthetics (in the words of New Latin American Cinema (NLAC) theorist Julio García Espinoza), the works of the ECA are not conditional on the competitiveness and financial expectations of commercial cinema, nor on the stylistic standards and internationalization of auteur cinema (Bedoya 2015, p. 17). Instead, the ECA establishes an idea of cinema for the rainforest, outside commercial circuits of cinematographic exhibition and their regimes of consumption, which favor what they perceive as an “apolitical” sort of visibility and recognition for this region. More correctly grouped with what is considered independent film, Amazonian cinema cannot be easily encapsulated within artistic experimentation or individual authorship (both distinguishing features of a certain type of Peruvian indie film), but rather within the intersection between the individual and communal planes, through narrative modalities and techniques that are still conventional. This study is set against the present crisis of neoliberal legitimacy (Gago 2014, p. 11) that is being generated by an accumulation, multiplicity, and intersection of social movements throughout the region, from Turtle Island to Patagonia.2 In Peru, a perception of the present as a time of inescapable social fragmentation (Chauca 2015, p. 2) or as possessed by an individualistic ethic (Ubilluz 2017, p. 232; Hibbett 2018, p. 513) is now giving way to ever-clearer displays of social regrouping in opposition to many oppressions, both within and outside the capital city. The ECA is precisely one of these cases, opposing a reading that characterizes the contemporary Peruvian cultural scene as depoliticized. Nonetheless, its mode of formulating the political departs from a purely counterhegemonic logic that would advocate for a total rejection of, in this case, conventional forms of filmmaking or the state resources that make it possible. In fact, the ECA’s sustainability is owed primarily to funds obtained through the Audiovisual Cultural Management Projects contest administered by the office of the Dirección del Audiovisual, la Fonografía y los Nuevos Medios [Directorate of Audiovisual, Sound Production, and New Media] (DAFO) of the Ministry of Culture. Nor are the ECA’s

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films subject to discourses that address social struggle as an antagonistic arrangement of repressive forces versus marginal sectors, as in the language of the Peruvian and Latin American political cinema of the sixties and seventies.3 Distinct from this vision and from the paradigm of giving voice to the voiceless, the ECA forges a small-scale political cinema centered on community formation for the purpose of filmmaking. By doing so, it takes on collaborative challenges in order to formulate critical views on and from Amazonian realities, putting concrete, everyday perspectives of the social, cultural, and economic issues that shape said realities up for debate. In the first part of this chapter, I will delve deeper into these micropolitical spheres through an examination of the pedagogical principles and the conditions of production, exhibition, and circulation put forth by the ECA. In the second and third parts, the analysis of Anhelos de mujer (2014) and Ritual Yanesha (2017) will allow me to evaluate the community arrangements that are configured both on and off the screen through the stories told. I chose these shorts because women are among the most commonly recurring subjects within the body of fifty works, including documentaries and fiction pieces, that the ECA has produced from 2014 to the present. These films also demonstrate a pronounced tendency in the school: the growing presence of female students. I will analyze discourses of the community and narrative modalities—that is, modes of organization of the voice that suggest a certain way of interpreting reality—in these documentaries. Toward the end, I will discuss, in very preliminarily terms, the possibilities of speaking of an indigenous cinema in Peru or, in other words, of a cinema managed in all its stages by the Native peoples of the Peruvian Amazon.

The Micropolitical Spheres of the ECA According to Fernando Valdivia (2019), the idea of creating a film school in the Peruvian Amazonia emerged from an intersection of various paths. These paths are: (1) The NLAC of the sixties and seventies; (2) Popular video, of a participatory and educational nature and with a social orientation, which emerged in Peru in the eighties; (3) The documentaries produced by Valdivia in the Peruvian Amazonia during the 2000s, which resulted from his collaborations with the Bora, Shipibo-Konibo, Achuar, Isconahua, and Amahuaca peoples; (4) Valdivia’s experience as a trainer at workshops organized in alliance with different cultural and institutional

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agents, and directed toward Amazonian indigenous people starting at the end of the nineties and during the whole first decade of the 2000s. Following the paths of the political cinema of the sixties and seventies and of popular video, the ECA adopts a vision of the audiovisual medium as a tool in the service of social transformation, while emphasizing audiovisual training in order to adapt the medium to the needs and demands of excluded sectors. At the same time, the ECA’s proposal responds to training experiences carried out in the Amazonia. Out of the many cases of colonial or exoticist film that Valdivia himself (2018) has studied, one experience of self-representation undertaken by members of the Shipibo-Konibo people stands out. In 1973, Dutch anthropologist Tom Arden, who had arrived in Pucallpa with other Dutch collaborators, created the Proyecto Audiovisual Shipibo. With this project, Arden’s goal was to use film to raise awareness among the Shipibo-Konibo people about the exploitation of natural resources, having some of them create and film their own stories. Although the resulting works—of which no record remains—had a positive impact, circulating widely and stimulating conversation at screenings, the locals who received training did not film again after Arden’s departure (Valdivia 2018, p. 13). The more progressive training activities, such as the ones undertaken by Valdivia himself in 2000, have not made the same impact as Arden’s; rather, they are of a sporadic nature and are still dependent on the role of experts. Under the principle of audiovisual democratization, the ECA proposes broad access to all aspects of cinematographic activity through an education program permanently based in Pucallpa in which Marín and Valdivia are the principal trainers. Enrollment in the workshops has a low cost (150 soles, equivalent to $45 U.S. dollars), comparable to the monthly tuition of Peruvian universities. The ECA uses funds it has received continuously from the DAFO office since 2015, to award grants to low-income students, buy equipment, and pay for the trainers’ travel to rural communities. This funding has no discursive bearing on the ECA’s proposal or on the productions it manages. On the contrary, it is due to this funding that the school can facilitate audiovisual democratization without affecting the often precarious economic condition of the participants nor that of the trainers themselves, who do not charge for their work. This democratization coincides with the task of arranging screenings in the Amazonia, which is undertaken by the students themselves under the coordination of Kathy Quio. Their works are accessible through free showings in auditoriums in Pucallpa. The Municipality of Pucallpa has

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agreed to provide the ECA with access to its auditorium facilities and equipment and has also given the school permission to arrange film screenings in plazas and other public spaces. Outside the city, in marginal urban areas and rural indigenous communities, outdoor screenings are organized through local organizations. In all of these cases, the principal purpose is not only to disseminate the students’ projects locally in order to contribute to their work’s recognition and to organize cultural meeting spaces, but also to return the images to the community where the works were filmed, for debate and reflection (Quio 2019). After these screenings, a question-and-answer session takes place with the goal of moving the audience toward a commitment, a change, or a supportive action.4 Without relinquishing its local range of actions, the ECA also seeks a larger sphere of public debate, directing interest toward subjects that are not publicly addressed outside the rainforest. For this purpose, they make use of state channels without falling back on representations that adopt the folkloric vision of indigeneity that are sometimes promoted by institutions. Their works have been shown at universities in Lima and other regions, as well as on regional and national TV through the IPE channel of Peruvian National Television. In Lima, works from the ECA have been shown in the Sala Armando Robles de Godoy, a facility of the Ministry of Culture. In May 2017, with funding awarded through the DAFO contest, the school organized the Primer Festival de Cine Amazónico: there, student films were screened and public discussions were organized along with a permanent exhibition titled El cine amazónico en el Perú. As part of this distribution effort, the ECA’s films, including those analyzed in the second and third parts of this chapter, are available on the school’s YouTube channel.5 Audiovisual minga is another principle that transversally affects aspects of the school’s production and exhibition, expressly putting forth a community focus as the axis of creation and continuity of independent audiovisual work. Minga is a Quechua word that refers to communal work undertaken for the benefit of all those who participate. The term emphasizes the social act of filmmaking and, in the case of the ECA, refers to the support networks constructed among students during and after the workshops, allowing for collaboration on future projects outside the school (Valdivia 2018). In the workshops, this minga is developed in eminently practical classes. Before the workshop, the students develop potential storylines, and the best are chosen in class, forming teams for the shoots. In this phase, the trainers give only guidelines or advice: the

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students are the ones who make decisions (Valdivia 2019). Nevertheless, these interpersonal dynamics are not always untroubled. My analysis of the production processes of Anhelos de mujer and Ritual Yanesha will serve to give an account of the challenges that still emerge in the microspaces formulated by the ECA. The ECA’s first training experience took place in 2014. Ten students from the Universidad Nacional Intercultural de la Amazonia (UNIA) enrolled in the workshop, all of whom belonged to indigenous peoples. They were accompanied by two of their professors. The ECA’s pedagogic approach, based on horizontality and cooperation, was unable to prevent or resolve certain disagreements between students and professors which arose when the latter sought to organize themselves in order to shoot a short film (Valdivia 2018). In this same workshop, a more successful collaboration developed between Omar Inca Castillo, originally from Puno, and Mayra Espinoza, from Pucallpa. The result of this collaboration was the 15-minute short film Anhelos de mujer, about Shipibo-Konibo woman leader Carolina Barbarán of the Callería community of the Ucayali region. The idea for the documentary came from Mayra Espinoza, who had a work relationship with the Callería community. Espinoza works in an NGO that provides support to local communities in the areas of environmental sustainability and gender inequality (Inca Castillo 2019). Thanks to Espinoza’s connections, the directors succeeded in having the community share its struggle against climate change and its perspectives on its leader, the first woman authority figure in Callería. Not only did the shoot produce an exchange between the community and the directors which was key to realizing the story; it also propagated interest in audiovisual practice within the community, which was the project’s other goal. Some members of the Callería community also joined the production team, serving as lighting, camera, and sound assistants (Inca Castillo 2019).

Anhelos de Mujer The documentary opens with a sequence of photographs that serve as evidence of disproportionate, illegal logging, as well as of the deforestation that this activity causes in the area. The photographic portrait of the destruction of resources generates a tense, dramatic moment, in contrast to the testimonial narrative that follows. This contrast is owed not only to the fact that the filmed version of the story offers a dynamism

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lacking in the previous register, but also to the fact that this story goes beyond the context of crisis to which the photos attest. While the camera takes us deeper into the narrative and physical space of the setting, we hear Barbarán through voiceover, advising other communities like Callería to care for their lands and to organize themselves collectively in order to counteract the invasion of logging businesses and the conscious exploitation of their natural resources. Barbarán is shown as an actor who wants to inspire change not only on economic but also on social and political levels. As the first woman to be an authority, she stands up to the distrust of her peers—especially men, her husband among them—who doubt that she is capable of efficiently carrying out her role. In other scenes, her husband Arnaldo appears in order to suggest that his wife has ignored her domestic responsibilities and other duties with which she contributes to the familial economy (weaving and selling her wares). In the mode of a TV news report, the documentary adopts a testimonial modality based on alternating talking heads. This conventional narrative produces a simple, direct story that combines both planes of Carolina’s life, making them debatable off-screen. The documentary develops a vision of tense internal dynamics that present the community not as a frozen image, but as a space formed by heterogeneous perspectives that take up differing positions with regard to the possibility of change. If the solution against the loggers is territorial control and a self-managed economy, this self-determination also moves to a social and intimate level in the internal discussions staged and fostered by the audiovisual medium. In this sense, the discussion involves not only planning a community economy that counteracts the threat of the “external enemy,” but also confronting the internal imbalances that obstruct women’s participation in decision-making about the community’s fate. The woman chief, in this sense, represents an extreme case, out of which emerges the question of how these imbalances could be more accentuated for other women who are not authorities like her. Beyond the main characters, B-roll shots show women tending to their children, cooking, or spinning thread. In none of these shots does Carolina appear carrying out these tasks. In contrast, we see her in the forest in the company of a state agent, or interacting with other community members. One could argue that these images serve to certify what Arnaldo has said: that Carolina has abandoned the role of mother and wife. But they also allow for another reading, one that takes issue with

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this oppositional logic that separates men and women in accordance with the distribution of their roles. Following this logic, domestic work would be associated only with women, in opposition to the public and political work associated with men. This second reading proposes to diversify our vision of the aspects of women’s life in the Shipibo community, while dignifying the reproductive activities carried out by women for the community’s benefit. Although Carolina has momentarily put aside her domestic tasks, this does not mean that she rejects them, nor that they will not form part of her future functions. The question that remains is: With what attitude will she return to them? In any case, it is possible to be a mother, a wife, and a leader all at once because, as this reading suggests, domestic work is not opposed to political work (Tzul Tzul 2016, p. 23). Rather, the two spheres overlap, since both the productive and reproductive labor of Shipibo women are pillars of community life. Although its narrative structure appears to adopt an Aristotelian logic, this documentary does not end with a “solution” to the internal, communal, and domestic obstacles that the woman chief faces. Toward the end we also witness a political imaginary that she enunciates from the starting point of a “woman’s longing” not separated from the community environment. Unlike at the start of the film, the recipients of this desire are the women of other communities who would like to be chiefs like her. To them, Barbarán says, “We women can serve in this role, but we have to be strong.” Although the documentary favors Barbarán’s perspective, agreeing that women can indeed serve as authorities, with this statement it also runs the risk of idealizing women in general. In fact, at one moment a woman community member describes the chief as an effective and austere authority who spends less money than the men by virtue of being a woman. Nonetheless, the documentary also presents the perspective of Barbarán’s husband, which serves to attenuate this appreciation of women as austere and selfless. From this perspective, he suggests that the woman chief makes an excessive sacrifice in her role as an authority due to the lack of collaboration from other community members. In short, any idealization of feminine qualities is problematized from within the “community perspective” (Tzul Tzul 2016, p. 23) proposed by the film. In this sense, one wonders if the excessive sacrifice to which Arnaldo alludes would not provoke an imbalance that would place responsibility for change upon one person, preventing the community from taking on its share.

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Anhelos de mujer premiered in 2015 in Pucallpa and Callería, and then in Lima universities and cultural centers, on the state’s IPE channel and in local and international independent film festivals. After this first workshop, the training program grew to meet a rising demand in the rainforest for audiovisual education with a community focus. Nevertheless, limited access to the workshops—which affected many indigenous people living in areas far from Pucallpa, where the training took place— became an obstacle. In 2017, in partnership with the Universidad Católica Sedes Sapientiae—Nopoki (UCSS), the ECA offered a documentary workshop for youth of various indigenous peoples who were students there. This workshop included “monitors” with experience in audiovisual practice, who were familiar with the intercultural indigenous context of the UCSS, and whose task was to avoid hierarchies or divisions between students (as occurred at the UNIA). Ritual Yanesha para convertirse en mujer was one of the three short films produced at the workshop.

Ritual Yanesha Para Convertirse En Mujer Like Anhelos de mujer, this story is centered on a woman belonging to an indigenous group, the Yanesha, the difference being that this documentary is directed by that same woman. The subject is a ritual practiced by Yanesha women after the first menstruation. Here, the personal story of Lorena Montes Valerio (the documentary’s director) is blended again with a community perspective. This intersection allows for the continuity of a specific cultural memory in and beyond her community of origin. The documentary is divided into three narrative segments: a testimonial segment, a performative segment in which the ritual is recreated, and a reflexive segment through which, according to Bill Nichols (2001, p. 125), the documentary demonstrates what it is: a representative construction. The documentary opens with Yanesha songs and the painted face of a character who will represent Lorena Montes Valerio in the performative section. In the following testimonial section, Lorena reveals to us that in her school days she was disconnected from her language and culture until she decided to voluntarily undergo the feminine ritual of transition to adulthood. Next, we see the fictional recreation of the ritual, which begins with Lorena’s decision to remain shut away in her grandparents’ farmhouse for three months. This recreation is acted out by two actresses who play the parts of Montes Valerio and her grandmother,

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who is charged with caring for her and teaching her the meanings of the ritual. Lorena speaks up through voiceover to supplement the information given by the characters, adding to the ritual’s interlocutor (the character representing Lorena) who is also feminine and who is located off-screen. Lorena states in voiceover: “It was in that time, in those three months, when an elder woman teaches you about the medicinal plants and what you are going to do inside the hut, like weaving, spinning.” With this allusion to “you,” the narrating voice addresses other young women like her with a pedagogical purpose, inviting them to recover their own knowledge by listening to their grandparents. The documentary is made up of its message as much as its medium (Córdova 2014, p. 124), teaching about a ritual that is of interest to Yanesha youth and, more implicitly, to the youth of other peoples with similar processes of cultural recovery. According to Nichols’s classification (2001, p. 131), this scene belongs to a performative modality through which the documentary offers knowledge incarnated and situated through a non-audiovisual medium. In this way, the documentary becomes the medium for the interand intragenerational transmission of a particular knowledge. Likewise, the documentary possesses a self-reflexive or metafilmic perspective that is individual while not ceasing to be collective. Like Anhelos de mujer, Ritual Yanesha is a response to essentialist perspectives that assign the condition of exoticized minority to the indigenous subject—perspectives through which this indigenous person is seen as a subject to be understood, incapable of producing knowledge about itself. In this sense, as Nichols points out “performative documentary can act as a corrective to those films where ‘We speak about them to us’” (2001, p. 134). In contrast, “we”—incarnated by the Yanesha community, gathered together on-screen—“speak about ourselves to you.” The “you” in this perspective is the female viewer from this or another indigenous group, interested in the recovery of her own traditions. This intragenerational relationship between women also operates on a level outside the diegesis of the ritual. On this level, the “you” to which Lorena’s voiceover refers also becomes an “us.” Thus, the documentary also offers an intercultural perspective between peoples, through which “we speak about ourselves to us” (Nichols 2001, p. 134). After the staging of the ritual, Lorena reappears, talking about her enrollment in UCSS—Nopoki, where, as she desired, she continued her education, exchanging knowledge and experiences with other indigenous people. Next, the documentary, which was filmed in the gardens and orchard

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of the UCSS, shows a space similar to a maloca, the assembly place of Amazonian peoples. The film crew, made up of young indigenous students like Lorena, appears in this space wearing kushmas, the traditional attire of their people. The crew members pose, smiling, showing off the film equipment and celebrating the work they have achieved. After that, Lorena mentions the names of the peoples to which her team members belong: Matsigenka, Ashaninka, Shipibo, Yine, Nomatsigenga, Yanesha. Returning to Nichols’s classification, this scene in the maloca would belong to a reflexive modality that, more evidently than the previous one, puts forth the audiovisual as both a technology and a medium of representation. I would add that, in this case, the audiovisual is also alluded to as a social act. The scene itself includes a meta-performative component through which the creative subjects of the documentary connect themselves to the very process of filming. Lorena’s teammates not only participated in the production; they also created the script with her, as is indicated in the credits. Before, Montes had mentioned that the ritual presented had equivalents in many cultures, which is a key to understanding the script’s collective creation. This moment emphasizes the indigenous youths’ appropriation of film as a tool for intra- and intercultural communication. It also constitutes a challenge to collective authority. According to Schiwy, this mode of appropriation challenges essentialist beliefs that presuppose modes of indigenous representation as non-modern knowledge, paying no attention to the complex relationships these peoples have maintained throughout their history with Western technologies and knowledge (2009, p. 178). The challenge to this presupposition is especially evident in a young generation, like the one that produced this film, made up of habitual users of the Internet and cellphones. In step with this self-referential scene, the choices of Lorena’s life present a critical vision of her own cultural traditions. Her decision to go to university and leave her community invites us to consider a perspective on Yanesha life that distances us from the paradigm of the indigenous versus the mestizo [mixed] or the modern. Under this paradigm, the former is conceived as rooted to the rural community sphere, in opposition to the latter, which is seen as a condition acquired once one migrates to the urban center. In contrast, Montes Valerio, through her desires to be initiated in the ritual and the customs of her people, to attend university, and to settle physically outside the life of her community, proposes the

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question of how to transform oneself without losing what one has (Tzul Tzul 2016, p. 172). In this way, the short proposes a relationship with the traditions and social expectations surrounding women’s roles without signifying a renunciation of Yanesha knowledge or of the community as a platform that provides the protagonist with personal and interpersonal enrichment both within and beyond her culture. The confluence of these narrative modalities suggests a dialogue and negotiation between different media of knowledge production like oral narration, cultural performance, and audiovisual technology. In this confluence, the audiovisual is just another medium in the service of identity and community reflection. This is why the documentary is adopted as a genre in its essential condition as evidence and document. Evidence of what? On the one hand, evidence of a knowledge that Lorena’s grandparents share with her and that their granddaughter is able to record and represent this through the image, in accordance with the social and performative condition of this knowledge; on the other, evidence of an intercultural relationship that, along with communication between generations within a single culture, is legitimized as necessary in order to maintain and transmit a piece of knowledge. By framing social dynamism in the service of cultural transmission and recovery, the short film as pedagogical material is differentiated from the academic knowledge offered by limited-access books, in which this dynamism cannot be recreated. Rightly adopted as material for discussion and teaching, Ritual Yanesha has been shown at UCSS—Nopoki and is currently used in courses at that university.

Final Reflections The ECA emerged from rethinking and transforming proposals like those of the political cinema of the NLAC of the sixties and the Peruvian popular video of the eighties. Unlike these proposals, the ECA seeks to train filmmakers in a region, the Amazonia, that has been marginal in the development of activist cinema with social resonance. Facing the environment of multicultural inclusion fostered by neoliberalism, which produces and administers differences (Hale 2002, p. 490), the ECA proposes the formation of micropolitical spheres from on-screen to off-screen, constructing a vision that challenges folkloric visibility as a condition for the recognition and inclusion of indigenous subjects. Faced with apparent social fragmentation and the exacerbation of individuality fostered by

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neoliberalism, the school proposes the contrary: a community cinema centered on social creativity and critique. The case of the ECA illustrates the often-ignored side of the Peruvian cinema of the last two decades, countering that reductive and exclusionary vision that only considers commercial or auteur cinema. This proposal of Amazonian cinema from Amazonian perspectives puts forth visibilities that are “minor” without being minority, localized outside the market’s recognition and originating from the historical marginality of the voices of the rainforest as they participate in public debate. The ECA’s sense of the political differs from the antagonistic logic fostered by continental and Peruvian political cinema, which still serves as a reference by which the “radicality” of social transformation projects are measured. Its politics are not constituted along the lines of class struggle, nor are they formulated with their back turned to state programs that facilitate—albeit limitedly—collective undertakings of cultural management. Instead of depending on these antagonisms, the short films analyzed here propose a vision that is centered on social relations and, within them, on the role of indigenous women in facets where they are not traditionally expected. In the first documentary, we have the story of the first Shipibo woman to be named an authority in her community, while in the second, we witness the testimony of a young Yanesha woman who directs a documentary about one of her people’s rituals. These representations show that they are quite far from offering stereotypical or restrictive images of “being Amazonian.” Before attesting to established identities (Shipibo-Konibo or Yanesha), both documentaries express a sense of transformation that revises established norms instead of discarding them completely, based on a social and cultural dynamism not unrelated to the community reinventions of Amazonian peoples. Off-screen, in the social field, the workshops from which these documentaries and other more recent projects emerged, put forth a process of community cinema formation—a process not without obstacles and reformulations. The ECA’s challenge continues to be one of organizing workshops that adapt to the pace of life and the economic precariousness of indigenous peoples. This task implies developing an intercultural relationship that leads not just to a collaborative form of cinema that follows the legacy of the NLAC, as is the case of Anhelos de mujer. The ECA’s work also implies a movement toward a cinema of self-representation that, as in Ritual Yanesha, broadens the notion of individual authorship attributed to the director in order to strengthen

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collaborative bonds in all aspects of production, exhibition, and consumption. The challenge consists, then, of formulating criteria that reflect the concrete and changing realities of the distinct indigenous peoples that live in Amazonia, in order to subvert the conditions imposed by the colonization of the image of the same peoples, as the history of this region’s cinema shows. The ECA’s latest workshops, organized in rural communities in 2019, face this challenge, bringing interested youth of mestizo descent together with youth from diverse indigenous peoples, like the Shipibo-Konibo, the Tikuna, and others. For Valdivia, Amazonian cinema will go on “as long as the original peoples of the Amazonia feel that filming, showing, and sharing films is useful to strengthen their people and bring them visibility before the world.” (2018, p. 17) Indeed, the dissemination of their own perspectives, the strengthening of intergenerational relationships, the fostering of internal reflections in order to consolidate organizational connections, and the expansion of networks of solidarity, all in line with the principles and practices of the ECA, are some of the characteristics of a cinema developed by indigenous peoples in other contexts, such as Mexico, Bolivia, and Brazil. In spite of the challenges mentioned here, the audiovisual self-representation of indigenous peoples is not a non-existent process; rather, it is very much alive and ongoing. This chapter was translated by Arthur Dixon.

Notes 1. Valdivia is the ECA’scurrent director and a trainer in the school’s documentary production workshops. Carlos Marín is an academic coordinator and trainer in the area of fiction, and Kathy Quio is a producer and cultural promoter for the ECA. Since 2014, Tania Medina has been the school’s executive producer. 2. “Turtle Island” is the name that the majority of North American native peoples use to refer to the region now occupied by the United States and Canada. 3. Although Peru remained on the margins of the NLAC, in the Andean region a participatory cinema came about that adopted some of its narrative and aesthetic proposals. Nora de Izcué’s documentary Runan Caycu [I Am a Man] (1973) and Federico García Hurtado’s feature film Kuntur Wachana (1977) put forth a representation of indigenous peoples and agricultural laborers in the context of these sectors’ mobilization to reclaim

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their lands. The ECA’s case shows that this influence is also present in Amazonia. 4. These conversation sessions are a legacy of the NLAC, broadly adopted at festivals and film screenings in the region. 5. .

Works Cited Anhelos de mujer [Women’s Longing], 2014. [film] Directed by Omar Inca Castillo and Mayra Espinoza. Pucallpa: Escuela de Cine Amazónico. Barber, K., 2019. Feminismo poscolonial: Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui: “Tenemos que producir pensamiento a partir de lo cotidiano.” El salto, [online] 17 February. Available at: [Accessed 29 March 2019]. Bedoya, R., 2015. El cine peruano en tiempos digitales. Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Universidad de Lima. Chauca, E., 2015. Comunidades imaginadas imposibles: derechos humanos y neoliberalismo en el cine y la literatura latinoamericana. Alter/nativas, 5, pp. 1–23. Córdova, A., 2014. Reenact, Reimagine: Performative Indigenous Documentaries of Bolivia and Brazil. In: V. Navarro and J. C. Rodríguez, eds. 2014. New Documentaries in Latin America. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 123–144. Gago, V., 2014. La razón neoliberal: economías barrocas y pragmática popular. Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón. Hale, C. R., 2002. Does Multiculturalism Menace: Governance, Cultural Rights and the Politics of Identity in Guatemala. Journal of Latin American Studies, 34, pp. 485–524. Hibbett, A., 2018. Review: Cortez, Enrique E. (edición, introducción y suplemento). Incendiar el presente. La narrativa peruana de la violencia política y el archivo (1984–1989). Lima: Campo Letrado, 2018. 350 pp. Lexis, 42(2), pp. 511–517. Inca Castillo, O., 2019. Conversation About Production, Circulation and Exhibition of Anhelos de mujer. [phone call] (Personal communication, 20 September 2019). Kuntur Wachana [Where the Condor Is Born], 1977. [film] Directed by Federico García Hurtado. Peru: Producciones cinematográficas Huaran. Nichols, B., 2001. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Quio, K., 2019. Conversation About Circulation and Exhibition of ECA’s Works. [phone call] (Personal communication, 29 March 2019).

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Ritual Yanesha para convertirse en mujer [Yanesha Ritual to Become a Woman], 2017. [film] Directed by Lorena Montes Valerio. Atalaya: Escuela de Cine Amazónico. Runan Caycu [I Am a Man], 1973. [film] Directed by Nora de Izcue. Peru: n.d. Schiwy, F., 2009. Indianizing Film: Decolonization, the Andes, and the Question of Technology. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Schiwy, F., 2014. An Other Documentary Is Possible: Indy Solidarity Video and Aesthetic Politics. In: V. Navarro and J. C. Rodríguez, eds. 2014. New Documentaries in Latin America. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 145–165. Tzul Tzul, G., 2016. Sistemas de gobierno comunal indígena: mujeres y tramas de parentesco en Chuimeq’ena’. Guatemala: SOCEE, Sociedad Comunitaria de Estudios Estratégicos; Tz’ikin, Centro de Investigación y Pluralismo Jurídico; Maya’ Wuj Editorial. Ubilluz, J., 2017. La venganza del indio: ensayos de interpretación por lo real en la narrativa indigenista peruana. Lima: FCE. Valdivia, F., 2017. La Amazonía se rebela y se revela: la experiencia de la Escuela de Cine Amazónico. Pucallpa: s.n. Valdivia, F., 2018. Amazonía, los caminos hacia la autorepresentación indígena en el cine peruano. La otra cosecha, [e-journal] 1. pp. 12–17. Available at: [Accessed 15 December 2018]. Valdivia, F., 2019. Conversation About ECA’s Methodology. [phone call] (Personal communication, 14 April 2019).

CHAPTER 17

Bursting Lima’s Film Bubble: Women in the Contemporary Nonfiction Filmic Scene in Peru Isabel Seguí

Introduction Gendered social relations define the production culture in any given creative environment. This chapter addresses the case of the contemporary female-led nonfiction cinematic scene in Peru, understanding it as a complex scenario that has been created, sustained, and galvanized by the diverse roles women have played within it since its inception. The independent, noncommercial nature of nonfiction filmmaking and its “egalitarian production practices based on collaboration, trust, mutual aid and respectful equity—not just among members of the creative team but between crews and subjects” (Turnin 2015) have attracted and boosted women’s involvement in a nonego-driven mode of film production—with its correspondent non-auteurist, collectively achieved, aesthetic result. Trailblazers such as Nora de Izcue have been, more or less and only quite recently, incorporated into the official film history and

I. Seguí (B) University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 C. Vich and S. Barrow (eds.), Peruvian Cinema of the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52512-5_17

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cinephile memory—two dangerously merged concepts in the Peruvian case. However, other significant contributors such as María Barea in production and direction, or Victoria Chicón in editing, have been neglected due to, I argue here, biased colonial and masculinist perspectives and praxis. One of the main reasons for this oversight is the enormous influence of the editorial perspective of the journal Hablemos de Cine on the “official” critical and historiographic composition of the canon of Peruvian cinema. For as Jeffrey Middents has argued, the hablemistas ascribed value mostly to those works that emulated European auteur cinema while sidelining “other” ways of making films (2009, p. 53). This chapter does not intend to fill completely a historical void that is so lacking from various angles. However, using the theoretical framework of feminist film history, which highlights the work of women in the film industry and offers a comprehensive analysis of both production processes and film texts, I set out to counteract and complement those generally used auteurist and formalist perspectives that have the unintended consequence of expelling women from the narrative. Along these lines, Patricia Zimmermann, in her article “Flaherty’s Midwives” (1999), raises the issue of the need to create a noncompetitive feminist historiography. She writes that: Simply constructing new feminist mythologies about repressed or forgotten documentary goddesses to replace old, patriarchal, dead Flaherty would fail to engage and dismantle these foundational myths and images. As historiography, that practice would merely create a competitive history rather than one that rethreads the very processes of historiography, a history of great women makers-of-conscience in opposition to the history of great men of documentary exploitation. (Zimmermann 1999, p. 65)

What is needed then is not a history of individual accomplishments, but a narrative about women-led collaborative practices that challenge the specific structures that underpin the masculinist paradigm. Zimmermann’s contribution is key because she reflects on the importance of writing the history of the physical, emotional, and organizational labor behind documentary films, festivals, encounters, seminars, and series. In a precarious scenario, women’s activities sustain and guarantee the mere existence of spaces that allow for independent, artisanal film cultures to exist (Zimmermann 1999, p. 80). In the Latin American case, this is instrumental because the vast majority of film cultures are nondependent on industrial

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modes of production. Hence, they remain permanently underfunded and only sustained by a communitarian praxis where women play a substantial role. Claudia Bossay and María Paz Peirano also describe and characterize the specific culture of communal survival and solidarity that characterizes female-led cinematic projects. They link women’s documentary-making practices with specifically female forms of resistance and dissidence. Although they study the Chilean case, their thesis can be applied elsewhere in Latin America, where women filmmakers rooted in specific political cultures use tools and strategies stemming from broader patterns of popular organization. Moreover, in their filmmaking practices, they perform the traditional feminine role of organizers and sustainers of the family and the community. As Bossay and Peirano suggest: “women continuously se hacen cargo [take charge] of urgent business in order to survive” (Bossay and Peirano 2017, p. 71), and “apply their experience as mothers, teachers and home-makers to the public sphere” (Bossay and Peirano 2017, p. 70). In this chapter, I showcase how Peruvian women se hacen cargo of the documentary scene through the study of two practitioners who are enabling a paradigm shift: the cultural manager and producer Diana Castro and the director, teacher, and organizer Lorena Best. To frame and contextualize these cases, what follows next is a concise history of women’s nonfiction filmmaking in Peru.

Peruvian Women’s Nonfiction Filmmaking: Fifty Years of History Peruvian women documentary makers have always been at the forefront of nonfiction filmmaking. Nora de Izcue premiered her first documentary, Así se hizo La muralla verde [This is How La Muralla Verde Was Made] (1970), in Karlovy Vary, Czechoslovakia, in 1970. Then, with Runan Caycu [I Am a Man] (1973), her career took off and led her to develop different participatory creative processes with various subaltern groups in Peru over the subsequent decades. She worked with Quechua, AfroPeruvian, and Amazonian communities, organizations of migrant women in the city, and also had time to reflect on her own social class. Her most recent film Responso para un abrazo: tras la huella de un poeta [Requiem for an Embrace: In the Footsteps of a Poet], an homage to her late friend César Calvo, was released in 2013.

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Few people know that the idea for the first film from the Chaski group Miss universo en el Perú [Miss Universe in Peru] (1982) came from María Barea, who wrote the project and obtained the funds thanks to her credit as director of Mujeres de El Planeta [Women of El Planeta] (1981), since neither Stefan Kaspar nor Alejandro Legaspi nor Fernando Espinoza (fellow Chaski members) had previous experience in direction. However, she was excluded from the editing process of her own film in what she defines as a clear example of machista-leninista behavior by Legaspi and Espinoza (Seguí 2018, pp. 28–29). Barea left Chaski after producing Gregorio (1985) and formed, in 1989, the first group of women documentary filmmakers in Peru: Warmi. The documentary and docu-fiction films by Warmi Porque quería estudiar [Because I Wanted to Go to School] (1990), Antuca (1992), and Hijas de la violencia [Daughters of War] (1998) have been largely overlooked by film historians to date. Shortly after, the “subjective turn” made its entrance into the field of Peruvian documentary production with the contributions of the groundbreaking diasporic filmmaker Mary Jiménez (Godoy 2013). Both she and fellow filmmaker Heddy Honigmann have been very influential on the new generations of documentary makers in terms of form and content. In the twenty-first century, the incorporation of women into the Peruvian documentary scene has increased not only in film production tasks but in the organization of nonfiction festivals and other educational and curatorial spaces. Currently, the list of women making documentaries in Peru or across the diaspora, or organizing festivals and encounters dedicated to nonfiction, is extensive.1 In fact, in recent years, women’s nonfiction cinema has entered the spotlight in Peru. Series, homages and roundtables have been organized in cineclubs and other spaces. Some of these events have been curated by specialists in nonfiction such as John Campos (director of Transcinema. Festival Internacional de Cine) and Mauricio Godoy (member of DocuPeru and lecturer on documentary at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú).2 As for the festivals, one of the essential nonfiction film events in the country, Corriente - Encuentro Latinoamericano de Cine de No-Ficción—held annually in Arequipa since 2014—regularly shows works by Peruvian women, and devoted a section to María Barea in its last edition. Moreover, the Festival de Cine Hecho por Mujeres paid homage, in its first two editions (2018 and 2019), to seasoned directors Nora de Izcue, María Barea, Mary Jiménez, and Marianela Vega. Even more recently, in August 2019, the 23rd Festival de Cine

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de Lima organized a public conversation among representatives of three generations of documentary makers: Nora de Izcue, Mary Jiménez, Sofía Velázquez, and Lali Madueño. This opportunity for an in-depth dialogue revealed the similarities but also the profound differences between them regarding their contextual and personal motivations for filmmaking, political standpoints, and aesthetic choices.3 As all these recent events evidence, Peruvian women documentary makers are finally attracting public attention. I argue, thus, that the academic milieu urgently needs to recognize and reflect on their practices, politics, and poetics, and this chapter aims to fill a few aspects of this gap.

Diana Castro: Delivering a New Culture of Production Diana Castro (Lima, 1993) is, despite her young age, already an established film producer and accomplished cultural manager. She participated in some of the early editions of the Festival de Cine Lima Independiente and founded Transcinema.4 Moreover, since 2013, she has produced over twenty films of fiction and nonfiction. Currently, she co-directs El Galpón-Transcinema, a newly refurbished exhibition space that is already a reference point for independent cinema in Peru’s capital. Castro, a producer, is highlighted as a case study in this chapter focusing on her non-auteurist perspective, through which I make a gendered analysis of Peruvian film culture that departs from directorial perspectives. I have found that oral history accounts are one of the most useful and effective ways of obtaining nuanced narratives of complex cultural processes that challenge the dominant discourse created by product-focused approaches to film. Following this methodology, this section on Castro is mostly based on a lengthy interview I held with her, which works as a legitimate documented source to understand Castro’s métier and her agenda. The clarity of Castro’s overall objective stands out from this interview: she aims to break free from what she calls “Lima’s film bubble”5 and foster a new noncentralist, nonmasculinist, and nonhierarchical culture of production in Peru. In her words: I no longer tolerate the work logic in which the director of a film or a festival is supposed to be an enlightened being and you have to do everything he wants. Now I feel the courage to demand from the directors that, as a producer, I want to collaborate creatively in the project and I demand that the workflow is to be established on a collaborative basis. (Castro 2019)

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This empowered position results from a process of reflection on her intertwined life and work experiences. While still a teenager, she entered Lima’s independent film scene through the film critic and curator John Campos, her partner at the time.6 Her first project in production came by chance when their friend Manuel Siles offered her the opportunity to work as the location producer in Lima for the film Extirpador de idolatrías [Extirpator of Idolatries] (2013). By those same dates (2011–2012), the Festival de Cine Lima Independiente was starting. Castro describes and reflects upon her participation in this project quite graphically: Lima Independiente was a group of six super-cinephile men. Superintellectuals. And I was the chica buena onda [the girl with good vibes or good intentions] who helped and did little things. Although, in fact, I was producing the festival because these guys talked about movies all day, but nobody lifted a finger. At the time, I saw myself as simply helping. I thought that I was learning. Only years later, I understood the machismo that was present in that group. (Castro 2019)

Elsewhere, I have commented that personal bonds of love, friendship, or kinship—as well as relationships of conflict—cannot be ignored when studying Latin American film cultures, because most low-budget projects are cemented by them (Seguí 2018, p. 18). Thus, a rigorous scholarship must aim to historicize the personal in order to understand and problematize its cultural and political significance. In my research work, I bring to the fore examples of gendered power dynamics in Peruvian and other cinemas which need to be interpreted structurally. The evolution of the personal and professional relationship between Castro (a female producer) and Campos (a male director) is a good case in point. After the first two editions of Lima Independiente, John Campos came into conflict with the rest of the organizers and, by default, Castro also left the project without being asked her opinion: “they fought for their motives, but, since I was, in everyone’s eyes, just la chica de John [John’s girl], I also left. Nobody explained anything to me. Zero” (Castro 2019). Meanwhile, independently from Campos, Castro set up with other friends the Cineclub Pueblo Libre in the space of El Galpón. Thanks to her work as manager of this space, she met the entire young independent Peruvian film scene. At the same time, Castro founded Transcinema (first edition, July 2013), along with Campos, Mauricio Godoy, and Pablo Santur. This festival, with a radical editorial line, appeared as the indispensable window for nonfiction and experimental cinemas in Peru. For its

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second edition, Castro’s personal relationship with Campos had ended, yet Transcinema was blossoming. After Godoy and Santur abandoned the project for different reasons, Diana Castro was left to run the event, taking care of everything except programming—the very task perceived as the more intellectual, creative, and visible of any festival. In order to counteract this often assumed ascription of value, it is worth enumerating the invisible and essential tasks carried out by a festival head producer: elaboration of the annual plan that includes the rationale for each event; articulation of the objectives and themes; budget preparation (ideal, possible, and actual); schedule preparation; liaison and negotiation with the few exhibition venues available in Lima; fundraising (through applications to institutional calls and also knocking at the door of private companies to subsidize smaller expenses); communication and promotional campaign (visual design supervision, press); programming design (along with the director); contact with guests; and coordination of volunteer teams, including all tasks demanding substantial emotional labor. Furthermore, during the event itself, a head producer is in charge of all the activities and personnel needs to guarantee that everything runs smoothly. When, finally, the event is finished, the producer takes care of the finances and various evaluations. In 2017, Castro decided to quit Transcinema after successfully producing its first four editions. Commenting on the reasons, she states: I distanced myself from Transcinema because I have a lot of affinity with John [Campos] at the cinematographic level, but not at the level of management. He exercises the figure of “The Director” of the festival and for him, it could not be otherwise. For the fourth year, I created a team of young women who were working in different areas (press, image, lab, etc). They are super capable, very professional, but we felt that we were doing the bulk of the work, moving the machine along, while John was receiving all the public recognition. At one point, we started to wonder, why are we doing all this work while the “man” is the only one who is being interviewed? Although we shared John’s editorial line, that was not the image we wanted to project. (Castro 2019)

Castro and her team wanted a different, more horizontal structure and proposed to Campos the elimination of the figure of the director and the creation of a steering committee for the direction of the festival. He opposed the idea. Consequently, Castro and the other female members of the crew left the project. According to her: “The project continues

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because new young women came on board to produce the festival for John” (Castro 2019). This case is not a mere anecdote but a reflective personal perspective of events that serves as a valuable example of the mechanisms of marginalization and invisibilization of women’s labor in precarious cinematic cultures. The on-the-record version as offered directly by its protagonist, Diana Castro, coincides with the versions of the same facts and events that other people had given me in earlier more informal conversations. Remarkably, humorous undertones often accompany the off-the-record storytelling of anecdotes that exemplify male chauvinistic attitudes and patterns. This fact, although unconscious on the part of the speaker, underlines the trickiness of the task that oral historians confront. Normally, scholars dismiss this as mere tittle-tattle. However, I argue that this, and other examples, are neither gossip nor joke. What can be concluded from the facts exposed above is that the refusal by the charismatic director of a film festival to accept or even negotiate a clearly articulated and just demand of redistribution of power, led the team of women managing the event (one of them a co-founder) to leave their own project. Furthermore, they were replaced by a different group of highly capable women that continued to “produce the festival for him” in the same terms of power imbalance, and with Campos remaining as the undisputable visible face that capitalizes on the work of an entire collective. The history of the gendered power dynamics of film culture is searchable and verifiable. They should be examined because if we keep dismissing them as personal issues only fit for gossip, we are actively omitting crucial information and making poorer, less rigorous, research. In the specific case I am discussing, Transcinema develops into a highly distinctive and well-regarded festival not only due to the undeniable vision and quality of the programming put together by John Campos, but because of the work of an entire crew of women and men, many of them volunteers, that each year since 2013 have succeeded in carrying forward the project on a shoestring budget. The difference between Castro and previous generations of female producers is that she has found an alternative independent and fulfilling work path with relative ease, and she does not appear to hold any grudge. This latter point is demonstrated by the fact that she continues to work with John Campos on new projects such as the independent movie theater El Galpón-Transcinema, an initiative led by Castro, Campos, and Diana Collazos, which started to operate in August 2019 and aims to be “the great refuge of independent Peruvian cinema” (Rojas 2019). In this case,

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however, things are organized on her terms: “We sit down, think, feel, and then choose work dynamics that do not generate discomfort and stress for us. We choose to do things consciously and take care of each other. I feel that this is not a masculine but a feminine way of working” (Castro 2019). As for her experience as a producer of films, Castro is responsible for, among others, La última tarde [One Last Afternoon] (2016) by Joel Calero and La última noticia [The Latest News] (2016) by the Grupo Chaski. However, Castro considers that—as a consequence of inherited industrial and auteur cinema logics—fiction filmmaking follows a more vertical and masculinist power structure than nonfiction, which is why she has shifted to work mostly on nonfiction projects. For example, she has participated in the production of documentaries such as Miss Amazonas (2019) by Rafael Polar, and on the distribution of Rodar contra todo [Rolling Strong] (2015) by Marianela Vega. Currently, she is getting closer to fulfilling her objective of transforming the traditional boundaries and workflows in film production through her participation in two women-led projects in which, beyond acting as a producer, she is involved in the creative decision-making. These are Las cautivas [The Captives] by Natalia Maysundo—a family memory of the consequences of the War of the Pacific between Peru and Chile—and Círculo de tiza [Chalk Circle] by Diana Collazos and Jean Alcócer—a film that follows the mime and oral narrator Jorge Acuña Paredes. Furthermore, she is now directing her first film: Yuyarichani [I Am Remembering]. Castro thus represents a new generation of empowered women equipped with a challenging vision who are shaking up the power structures embedded in Peruvian cinema culture through their calm but unrelenting transforming action.

The Intuitive Cinema of Lorena Best Lorena Best (Lima, 1972) is an outsider who declares herself a noncinephile even though she is respected by “the new cinephilia.” Unlike the traditional cinephilia dominated by white middle-class cis straight male perspectives, this new version “sets out to multiply a diversity of voices and subjectivities, and a plethora of narratives about cinephilic life and experience” (Shambu 2019, p. 32). Best started making movies in her forties. In 2015, she premiered Las lecturas [The Readings] (2015), a film that, following the dialogical manner of the influential Brazilian documentary filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho, collects the testimonies of the users

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of the public library and cultural center Casa de la Literatura Peruana. Also in 2015, Best released the award-winning A punto de despegar [Just About to Take Off] (2015), which she co-directed with Robinson Díaz. In addition, she is now in the process of finishing her third documentary Una película elegante [An Elegant Movie], shot in the juvenile penal facility of Maranguita, in Lima. In order to contextualize and appreciate the motivations for Best’s decisions about her work as well as the work itself, we must understand her trajectory. During the intense Peruvian economic crisis of the 1990s, she migrated to Brazil to study Social Communication. There she found a thriving collaborative street culture and a popular art scene that had developed in a wide range of multidisciplinary artistic spaces. Among them, she found an alternative cinematographic environment populated by cineclubs and interconnected with other creative spheres. Thus, Best learned to understand cinema as a way of communicating through a medium linked to community spaces and processes. When she returned to Peru almost two decades later, Best realized that nothing similar to the artistic scene she witnessed in Brazil was in place in Lima. She was especially disappointed by the fact that cinematic spaces were managed by men, with an economic and/or auteurist cinephile approach, far away from her perception of cinema as “a space of desire and happiness” (Best 2019). However, that shock did not block her. Her more democratic and inclusive approach, together with her determination, helped her to create her own path, an alternative to—in Diana Castro’s words—that “Lima film bubble” which for so long has been responsible for a rather narrowly defined approach to cinema in Peru. In the history of Latin American film, it is widely understood that Latin American Third Cinema theory is mostly devoted to reflections on the need to decolonize film praxis, form, and content from the logics of Western cinema in order to create cinematic processes and products coherent with their emancipatory aims.7 Best seems to have accomplished this ideal without conflict, as an organic consequence of her overall approach to life. In her words: “I never considered (or desired) following industrial logics because I don’t come from a formal film school background, and that saved me some steps. I come from a self-taught and artisanal practice in everything in my life. I just transferred that to my cinema” (Best 2019). Instead of being obstacles, Best’s unlikely professional profile, age, and gender are strengths for a decolonizing film agenda.

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Best’s creative process is based on her intuition and emotion. She inhabits the “stage area” and connects with it in a very personal way that she then transmits to her collaborators. However, establishing this type of intimate connection with the space and its inhabitants takes time. Therefore, the processes of making her films are very long and deliberately unforced, since they are not entirely rational, monetizable, or susceptible to being subjected to a closed project logic. Lorena Best’s films show how a cinema based on sensation, intuition, and emotion can lead to the creation of a highly sophisticated cinematographic product. Moreover, her films have a clear political message not transmitted verbally but born out of the encounter between the subjectivities of the viewers, of the protagonists, and their mediators (the filmmakers). Best, like Diana Castro, has launched a paradigm shift. She perceives a distinct advantage in not having gone through film school because she has avoided being forced to adopt certain norms. Moreover, she defines herself as messy and forgetful, and she is not interested in accumulating a great deal of knowledge about cinema in general. Instead, she saves all the energy that cinephiles (old and new) spend on developing a knowit-all pose (Best 2019) and instead expends it on her own approach to cinema. However, despite not making any effort to be recognized by the traditional local cinephilia, Best finds herself at ease in the circles of the new Andean cinephilia (see mention of this circuit in Note 4). In these new initiatives, she has found complicity and openness to a mutually supportive way of doing things, but in the end, she admits that these spaces tend to repeat masculinist patterns because they are mostly composed of a select group of men that ultimately decide what is in and what is out. Thus, they are not so different from the old gatekeepers who are also still active. Nevertheless, I contend that this persistent obstacle is more a sign that bringing change to traditional gendered patterns of behavior in any given film culture, even a progressive one, is a slow process that requires negotiation and awareness-raising work on the part of the participants. Finally, we should consider that Best has family responsibilities and needs a regular income. She does not separate life and art: her several salaried jobs as a lecturer, community mediator, and manager of education projects, support both her household and her film-related work. Moreover, she participates as a mentor in different documentary pedagogical initiatives and has organized the third edition of the experimental film school TransFrontera (Tacna, 2018), a transnational project founded by

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the Chilean Camila José Donoso. Understanding this multitasking profile is essential: Best understands cinema as a set of activities that include not only making films, but also preservation, exhibition, discussion, and learning, and she gives the same value to all these tasks since they are part of a continuum. In that sense, Best’s approach to cinema connects with many Peruvian and Latin American women nonfiction filmmakers who do not recognize boundaries between life, art, and politics.

Case Study of a Praxis: A Punto de Despegar In this section, I focus more closely on the production practice of Best’s most well-known work to date, A punto de despegar [Just About to Take Off] (2015). The film tells the story of the expropriation and demolition of the Hacienda San Agustín in Callao, due to the expansion of the Jorge Chavez International Airport. She recognizes as direct references or sources of inspiration other Latin American, Spanish, and Portuguese nonfiction works of similar themes such as Aquí se construye (o ya no existe ese lugar donde nací) [Under Construction] (2000) by Ignacio Agüero; En construcción [Work in Progress] (2001) by José Luis Guerin; or the Fontaínhas trilogy by Pedro Costa—Ossos [Bones] (1997), No quarto da Vanda [In Vanda’s Room] (2000), Juventude em marcha [Colossal Youth] (2006). All these highlight places and ways of living that are being destroyed by modernization. Best has revealed that she fell in love with this space years ago, in 2002, when she joined her sister and her fellow classmates at San Marcos in an oral history project they conducted in San Agustín. After that first encounter, Best returned frequently to the ex-hacienda. She noticed that its inhabitants always expressed how they felt that the place was not entirely their own, but was rather a space from which they might eventually be expelled at any time. That is why, when the expropriation order came from the Ministry of Transportation and Communications, Best felt compelled to document the demolition. In March 2012, she started shooting alone once a week, and between December 2012 and February 2013, the small crew composed of Best, Robinson Diaz (co-director and camera operator), and Seiji Shimabukuro (sound operator) moved to live in San Agustín. Best was looking to create an intimate portrait of the dismantling of San Agustín while avoiding intrusiveness. The difference between

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Pedro Costa’s and Best’s processes is that the Portuguese director first clashed with the community of Fontaínhas (Lisbon) before developing a nonintrusive and respectful filmmaking methodology. By contrast, Best knew in advance how to proceed without causing disturbances because her relationship with the inhabitants of San Agustín—established years before—was solid and based on trust. The establishment of strong personal and emotional ties with the filmed subjects is common—but, of course, not exclusive—of women’s nonfiction film practices, and it definitely paves the way for a more horizontal and less traumatic shooting experience for those involved (Fig. 17.1). Space and time are the raw material of cinema. Best only works in places with which she has a personal relationship that derives partly from her inner memories and perceptions. In this case, Best’s starting point was her understanding that the scenery of San Agustín was embedded in her childhood memories of the Peruvian coastal landscape. Thus, her method of work was based on (re)cognition, and her search for images was helped by previous information she had been gathering unconsciously. In her words:

Fig. 17.1 Frame of A punto de despegar (Best 2015)

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There are places with which I connect and frame the shots easily because I have certain memories, and there are others with which it is difficult for me to connect and create a frame. This way of seeing and making films would be difficult to transfer to a more industrial way of doing things. (Best 2019)

While it might be difficult to believe that the frames were improvised because of their meticulous composition, depth of field, color, and overall harmony, to a certain extent they were also a product of a deep process of reflection that is symptomatic of Best’s rigorous research process. She comments that the reason behind this aesthetic refinement is that she had been thinking for a long time about how different places in San Agustín should be seen and represented. Hence, in almost every take, she already knew where to put the camera to get the best angle and light; while the actual mise-en-scène was neither preconceived nor the result of a deliberative search for locations, it was the product of habit and her lived experience of those particular spaces (Best 2019). As Stella Bruzzi notes, documentary is “a perpetual negotiation between a real event and its representation” (2000, p. 9). In this case, the filming routine was open and flexible. Every day, the filmmakers found out through the neighbors what was going to happen, decided on that basis where to place the camera and microphones, and then recorded events as they occurred. That approach proved to be very effective in capturing on the one hand the traumatic events as they unfolded, and on the other, the quotidian activities of the inhabitants of San Agustín amidst the dismantling of their living, working and communal spaces. The filmmakers also made some attempts to stage specific situations through reenactments, but this approach was not effective. In this particular case, a noninterventionist filmmaking methodology—just placing the camera in strategic spaces and waiting for the action to happen—resulted in footage more suited for Best’s desired tone and political intentions (Best 2019) (Fig. 17.2). At the end of the shoot, the filmmakers had recorded almost a hundred hours of material. Best and Díaz decided to take some time before editing, to let the experience and the images rest in their minds. For the postproduction phase, they secured funding from the Bolivian Goethe Institute that made no imposition on them in terms of how to present the content. Hence, with total freedom, they started editing the images and sounds of a community as it disappeared little by little, manually demolished

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Fig. 17.2 Film poster for A punto de despegar (Best 2015)

by teams of laborers composed of its very inhabitants who carefully stacked up the remaining materials, as if they were to be recycled in the construction of new homes elsewhere.

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This is a film about goodbyes. Two of the farewell sequences are crucial: the first, the relocation of the image of the patron saint and the departure of the last inhabitants of the old plantation house. St. Augustine is taken from the hermitage and carried onto a truck by his devotees. The truck transporting the saint through a devastated field—which just a few weeks before was fertile farmland—is one of the most iconic shots of the film, and provides a powerful parallel with the second farewell, the portrayal of the eviction of Dora, the elderly school teacher who had been living in the dilapidated old plantation house. She, a pillar of the community, is carried out—like the image of the saint—in the arms of a neighbor, who, with enormous care, crosses the patio and the gate to finally place her in a taxi to an unknown destination. When Dora is pulled away, fragile and light as a bird, it is as if, with her departure, a whole world disappears. The broad themes of environmental crisis and the global threat to nature and humanity are forefronted in the film, although not explicitly articulated. This is one of the greatest achievements of A punto de despegar as a political documentary film. San Agustín works as a case in point: a physical space and way of life that are erased to expand an airport. We learn that the neoliberal alternative to a productive agricultural area is more asphalt and carbon emissions. Thus, the late capitalist system is portrayed in all its contradiction without making explicit reference to systemic causes. All that we need to know is that while small peasant communities cool and oxygenate the planet, airplanes heat it. For further effectiveness, the threat represented by the airport is only present in the film in the form of the sound of the planes, which is original but not diegetic, and was introduced as a dramatic element in the postproduction by the sound designer Johuseline Porcel. Porcel is also a playwright, and along with Best, decided that the sound of the planes would work as another actor in the film, that is to say, as an important element of the narrative, an invisible but stalking presence that permanently disrupts and will soon take over the space of the ex-hacienda. The material result of the artistic collaboration between Best and Porcel, the soundtrack, embodies the collaborative and processual nature of Best’s filmmaking practice. In the same way, Díaz and Best found it difficult to distinguish, at the editing stage, which of them was the cameraperson behind the footage because the visual sensibilities of them both became aligned during the filming process.

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Lorena Best’s way of making films is distinctive and relevant to this essay as an alternative not only to the industrial mode of production, but to the auteurist and formalist paradigms of mainstream and academic film criticism. In Best’s films, we perceive and enjoy the affective undertones of the cinematic process in a way that helps us advance our understanding of documentary filmmaking as a sensitive, intuitive, and emotional mechanism for the interpretation of reality, as well as a way to achieve an enhanced form of communication among those involved (crew, subjects, spectators). This way, we experience once again how the mode of production directly affects the formal result of a film and why therefore the specific and distinctive filmmaking practices and politics of many women should be more greatly valued and incorporated into scholarly narratives.

Conclusion In the twenty-first century, practitioners such as Diana Castro and Lorena Best—part of a global counter-cinematic tradition of feminist documentary that can be traced back to the first half of the past century—are determined to break free from westernized masculinist frames of analysis and from Lima’s “film bubble” by nurturing, enabling, and creating a new film culture in Peru. This has as its baseline the egalitarian and affective practices that benefit the entire film community of paid and unpaid workers, subjects, and collaborators. This reality needs to be historicized, and to that end, invisibilized oral narratives—revealing the complex contribution of women’s film practices—should be incorporated as legitimate sources into written history. In order to achieve this goal in the context of contemporary Peruvian film culture, the present chapter has made use of alternative and new theoretical approaches (as articulated by Zimmermann 1999; Turnin 2015; Bossay and Peirano 2017; Seguí 2018) and research methodologies stemming from feminist film historiographical and ethnographic perspectives to understand the contribution of Castro and Best as prominent examples of women nonfiction filmmaking in Peru. This approach has also helped to reveal how women’s cinematic products—their films—embody the underpinning politics and ethos of their makers.

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Notes 1. To name just a few: directors such as Marianela Vega, Karina Cáceres, Malena Martínez, Gabriela Yepes, Lorena Best, Judith Vélez, María José Moreno, Sofía Velázquez, Patricia Wiesse, Karoline Pelikan, Dana Bonilla, and Ximena Valdivia; producers and organizers such as Lali Madueño, Diana Castro, Sara Lucía Guerrero, Morella Moret, Yalfrelis Farreras; or the ubiquitous editor Fabiola Sialer. 2. To provide a brief overview of the last four years: in March 2015, in commemoration of International Women’s Day, the cineclub Ojos Abiertos of the Centro Cultural de la Universidad Tecnológica del Perú organized a series of screenings of feature documentaries by Peruvian women. In November 2017, the critic John Campos curated the series Documentalistas: así, en femenino in the premises of the Centro Cultural del Ministerio de Cultura. The comprehensive program included works by over ten filmmakers. In March 2018, Mauricio Godoy, Fernanda Bonilla, and Mayra Villavicencio arranged the documentary series Lo personal es político: directoras peruanas y latinoamericanas at El Lugar de la Memoria, la Tolerancia y la Inclusión Social (LUM), featuring three generations of documentary filmmakers. The same year, in May, El Último Cineclub organized the series Documentalistas Peruanas Contemporáneas, which highlighted the heterogeneity and high quality of women’s contemporary nonfiction film production in Peru. 3. See the full session “Diálogos con Cineastas | Lo que nos une: una conversación sobre cine” in: . 4. Festivals such as Lima Independiente or Transcinema and other encounters and training spaces such as Corriente and Transfrontera are part of a new cinematic landscape in Peru led by a younger generation of cultural managers. All these projects have strong transnational connections with similar festivals and spaces in other Andean countries, such as the Festival de Cine Radical de La Paz, in Bolivia, or Encuentros del Otro Cine - Festival Internacional de Cine Documental, in Ecuador. These events showcase and help to bring about independent films that escape commercial classification to foster a new radical cinematic culture based on collaborative practices and challenging politics and aesthetics. Note that Cynthia Vich’s chapter in this volume also discusses the role played by independent film festivals in the Peruvian cinematic sphere. 5. All translations from statements made in Spanish, such as this one, are mine. 6. Other talented Andean producers such as Beatriz Palacios or María Barea had a similar initiation into the film world through older male partners.

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7. Glauber Rocha presented his text “The Aesthetics of Hunger” in 1965; Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino published “Towards a Third Cinema” in 1969; Julio García Espinosa published “For an Imperfect Cinema” in 1969. As for Andean contributions, Jorge Sanjinés and the Ukamau group published Theory and Practice of a Cinema with the People in 1978.

Works Cited Aquí se construye (o ya no existe ese lugar donde nací) [Under Construction], 2000. [film] Directed by Ignacio Agüero. Chile: Ignacio Agüero Asociados. Antuca, 1992. [film] Directed by María Barea. Peru: Warmi Films. A punto de despegar [Just About to Take Off], 2015. [film] Directed by Robinson Díaz Sifuentes. Peru: La Churunga Films. Así se hizo La muralla verde [This Is How La Muralla Verde Was Made], 1970. [film] Directed by Nora de Izcue. n.d. Best, L., 2019. Interview by the Author [video call] (Personal communication, August 9, 2019). Bossay, C. and Peirano, M. P., 2017. Parando la olla documental: Women and Contemporary Chilean Documentary Film. In: D. Martin and D. Shaw, eds. 2017. Latin American Women Filmmakers: Production, Politics, Poetics. London: I. B. Tauris. pp. 70–95. Bruzzi, S., 2000. New Documentary: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge. Castro, D., 2019. Interview by the Author [video call] (Personal communication, July 6, 2019). En construcción [Work in Progress], 2001. [film] Directed by José Luis Guerín. Spain: Ovídeo TV. Extirpador de idolatrías [Extirpator of Idolatries], 2013. [film] Directed by Manuel Siles. Peru: La luna pintada producciones. García Espinosa, J., 1969. Por un cine imperfecto [For an Imperfect Cinema]. Hablemos de cine, 55/56, pp. 37–42. Godoy, M., 2013. 180º gira mi cámara: lo autobiográfico en el documental peruano. Lima: PUCP. Gregorio, 1985. [film] Directed by Grupo Chaski. Peru: Grupo Chaski. Hijas de la violencia [Daughters of War], 1998. [film] Directed by María Barea. Peru: Warmi. Juventude em marcha [Colossal Youth], 2006. [film] Directed by Pedro Costa. Portugal, France, Switzerland: Ventura Film, Contracosta Produçôes, Les Films de L´Etranger. La última noticia [The Latest News], 2016. [film] Directed by Alejandro Legaspi. Peru: Grupo Chaski.

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La última tarde [One Last Afternoon], 2016. [film] Directed by Joel Calero. Peru and Colombia: Factoría sur producciones and Bhakti Films. Middents, J., 2009. Writing National Cinema: Film Journals and Film Culture in Peru. Lebanon: University Press of New England. Miss Amazonas, 2019. [film] Directed by Rafael Polar. Peru: Tamare Films. Miss universo en el Perú [Miss Universe in Peru], 1982. [film] Directed by Grupo Chaski. Peru: Grupo Chaski. Mujeres de El Planeta [Women of El Planeta], 1981. [film] Directed by María Barea. Peru: Pukara cine. No quarto da Vanda [In Vanda’s Room], 2000. [film] Directed by Pedro Costa. Portugal, Germany, and Switzerland: Contracosta Produçôes, Pandora Filmproduktion, Ventura Film. Ossos [Bones], 1997. [film] Directed by Pedro Costa. Portugal, France and Denmark: Madragoa Filmes, Gemini Films, and Zentropa Productions. Porque quería estudiar [Because I Wanted to Go to School], 1990. [film] Directed by María Barea. Peru: Warmi Cine y Video. Responso para un abrazo: tras la huella de un poeta [Requiem for an Embrace: In the Footsteps of a Poet], 2013. [film] Directed by Nora de Izcue. Peru: Naella producciones. Rocha, G., 1965. Uma Estética da Fome [The Aesthetics of Hunger]. Arte em revista, I(1), n.d. Rodar contra todo [Rolling Strong], 2015. [film] Directed by Marianela Vega. Peru: Blue producciones. Rojas, L., 2019. Un nuevo espacio para el cine peruano independiente: elgalpon.transcinema. Cinencuentro [online] 26 July. Available at: [Accessed 15 August 2019]. Runan Caycu [I Am a Man], 1973. [film] Directed by Nora de Izcue. Peru: Sinamos and ICAIC. Sanjinés, J., and Ukamau Group, 1978. Teoría y práctica de un cine junto al pueblo [Theory and Practice of a Cinema with the People]. Mexico: Siglo XXI. Seguí, I., 2018. Auteurism, Machismo-Leninismo, and Other Issues: Women’s Labor in Andean Oppositional Film Production. Feminist Media Histories, 4(1), pp. 11–36. Shambu, G., 2014. The New Cinephilia. Montreal: Caboose. Shambu, G., 2019. For a New Cinephilia. Film Quarterly, 72(3), pp. 32–34. Solanas, F. and Getino, O., 1969. Towards a Third Cinema. In: B. Nichols, ed., 1976. Movies and Methods: An Anthology. Berkeley: University of California Press. pp. 44–64. Turnin, S., 2015. Beyond the Female Gaze and Towards a Documentary Gender Equality. POV Magazine [online]. Available at: [Accessed 1 June 2019]. Zimmermann, P., 1999. Flaherty’s Midwives. In: D. Waldman and J. Walker, eds. 1999. Feminism and Documentary. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. pp. 64–83.

Epilogue

Given that two years have passed since we started working on this book, we would like to acknowledge some of the most significant developments that have characterized Peruvian cinema from 2018 until mid-2020. During this period, locally produced commercial comedies from Lima have continued to be the type of cinema consistently preferred by the majority of metropolitan audiences, along with horror and fantasy genre films in the provinces. However, the greatest achievements have been those within the art film category, with three debut features of the highest quality and impact: Canción sin nombre [Song Without a Name] (2019) by Melina León, La revolución y la tierra [Land and Revolution] (2019) by Gonzalo Benavente and Retablo (2019)1 by Alvaro Delgado Aparicio. At the global level, Melina León became the first Peruvian female director ever to have been selected for the Director’s Fortnight, one of the most prestigious sections of the Cannes Film Festival . Her film has also achieved significant success on the broader festival circuit, including the accumulation of at least thirty-two awards. Aesthetically very strong, Canción sin nombre follows in the footsteps of Claudia Llosa’s La teta asustada [The Milk of Sorrow] (2009) which laid the groundwork for a very distinctive treatment of the theme of memory of the armed conflict through a highly personal gaze. Based on the actual thefts of newborn children from migrant, empoverished mothers during the 1980s, the film explores this issue from a decidedly feminist perspective that focuses on the trauma experienced by the body and soul of one young mother © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 C. Vich and S. Barrow (eds.), Peruvian Cinema of the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52512-5

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(Wiener 2019). We believe that this viewpoint is the most distinctive contribution of Canción sin nombre to the significant number of Peruvian films that already deal with the subject of memory of the armed conflict. Also achieving ample success across the global festival circuits with over twenty-five awards so far, Retablo is a coming of age story that presents the issues of homophobia and toxic masculinity in Andean communities. The film, spoken entirely in Ayacuchean Quechua, has been lauded worldwide as a call for much needed tolerance and respect for diversity in terms of sexual orientation, and has attracted the attention of youth-focused programmers. At the national level, Retablo has joined the struggle of the LGBT community against prejudice, something that remains prevalent in twenty-first century Peru. Finally, La revolución y la tierra, a remarkable documentary that has become the latest national phenomenon, recounts President Velasco’s Agrarian Reform of the early 1970s, a crucial event in national history that for generations has been taught in a very negative light in Peruvian schools. The film has held a particular appeal to many among the millennial generation who are questioning the consequences of neoliberalism in Peru and beyond. It is notable that a documentary about events that took place half a century ago and that also presents an archival history of Peruvian cinema remained in Lima’s cinemas for eleven weeks, and then, due to audience demand, was released in provincial theaters with several shows per day. It has recently been released for streaming on Vimeo and enjoyed remarkable popularity. The success of these three recent films indicates the continuing dynamism of contemporary Peruvian cinema. This extends to the general expansion of cinematic culture both in Lima and in many parts of the nation,2 with festivals, alternative venues, online journals, blogs, television programs, and podcasts alongside a much greater number of films produced each year compared with the end of the twentieth century. Even in the recent crisis brought by COVID-19, Peruvian film culture has made enormous efforts to maintain its vitally; in spite of the inevitable drop in production, film festivals and similar events have continued online, and some have even attracted larger audiences since people from all over the world have been able to attend and participate. In the last twenty years, Peruvian film has decentralized, acquired global visibility and recognition, and developed greater diversity in terms of style, thematics, and those working in the field. Meanwhile, this very distinctiveness has to

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some degree reiterated the instability that prevails: the ongoing precarious conditions under which filmmakers are obliged to work; the lack, until very recently, of any meaningful legislative framework; the insufficient resources and, most importantly, the prevailing challenge of finding a consistent national audience. Consequently, filmmaking in Peru remains a challenging endeavour and given this, one might wonder why so many Peruvians from all over the country still want to create cinema. In spite of the fragility of the field, the landscape of cinema across the country has changed dramatically in the new millenium. As director Melina León appreciates, “living as a filmmaker in Peru thirty years ago was suicidal; making cinema today is difficult but is a real possibility” (cited by Gallegos 2019). As for the motivation for developing a truly national audience for Peruvian cinema, we feel it is crucial to recognize that the language of film offers a powerful and effective way of reaching people whose access to other forms of literacy is limited. Moreover, and especially in countries such as Peru, informality has opened up cinema as never before to people across geographical and class boundaries. Even if the act of watching a movie has become, in some cases, more individualized and dispersed, film spectatorship still provides opportunities for communities to be formed both physically at various kinds of venues or across online platforms. As for the filmmakers themselves, cinema production is a way of gaining prestige and celebrity status particularly at the local level: being a filmmaker in Lima, and more so in the provinces, is viewed as quite a unique profession, especially if your film is successful in achieving any kind of exhibition. But most importantly, we believe film has a role to play as a form of agency over telling one’s own story. In a world where it is so easy to create and share narratives about others, allowing for “third world” cultural stereotypes to be reinforced, Peruvian filmmakers have a responsibility to disrupt the narrow image of their nation that international producers might seek to project, as well as to challenge the potential use of their work as an instrument of the state.

Notes 1. The film was first screened at the Festival de Cine de Lima in 2017 where it won the award for Best Peruvian Film. It was not released in theatres until 2019.

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2. Film production levels have been maintained in the regions albeit with some variation across the various provinces. Those areas that produced the greater number of films in the first decade of the twenty-first century, Ayacucho and Puno, have decreased slightly in productivity, while in Junín levels have maintained and in Cajamarca there has been an increase (Bustamante 2020).

Works Cited Bustamante, E., 2020. Personal Correspondence with Authors (Personal Communication via Email, 24 March 2020). Canción sin nombre [Song Without a Name], 2019. [film] Directed by Melina León. Peru, Chile, Spain, USA: La Vida Misma Films, La Mula Producciones, Bord Cadre Films, MGC Marketing, Torch Films. Gallegos, J., 2019. Instantes eternos del cine peruano. La república [online] 31 December. Available at: [Accessed 1 January 2020]. La revolución y la tierra [Land and Revolution], 2019. [film] Directed by Gonzalo Benavente. Peru: Animalita, Autocinema Films, and Bebeto Films. Retablo, 2019. [film] Directed by Alvaro Delgado Aparicio. Peru, Germany, and Norway: Siri Producciones. La teta asustada [The Milk of Sorrow], 2009. [film] Directed by Claudia Llosa. Peru-Spain: Generalitat de Catalunya - Institut Català de les Indústries Culturals (ICIC), Ministerio de cultura, Oberón cinematográfica, Televisió de Catalunya (TV3), Televisión española (TVE), Vela producciones, and Wanda visión S.A. Wiener, G., 2019. Canción sin nombre. La república, [online] 16 August. Available at: [Accessed 20 August 2019].

Index

A Activism, 283, 292, 304 Actores, los [The Actors], 125, 126 Acuarelista, el , 137 Aesthetics of Hunger. See Rocha, Glauber Agamben, Giorgio, 108 Agrarian Reform, 344 Agüero, Ignacio, 332 Alcántara, Carlos, 38, 48, 49, 53–58, 60 Alcócer, Jean, 329 Alias Alejandro, 264 Alias La Gringa, 261 Almas en pena [Souls in Torment], 69 Alonso, Lisandro, 18, 127 Altiplano, 50, 61 Amazon, 53, 89, 124, 136, 210, 212 Amazonia, 304, 306, 307, 315, 317, 318 Amazonian, 136, 201, 213, 303–307, 314, 316, 317, 323 American Mumblecore, 283, 286 Anarchist, 291, 293

Anderson, Benedict, 9 Andes Andean, 68, 152, 223, 224 Andean cinephilia, 331 Andean communities, 66, 81, 112, 344 Andean culture(s), 145, 147, 151, 157, 161, 163, 166, 205, 224 Anhelos de mujer [Women’s Longing], 304, 306, 309, 312, 313, 316 Antín, Manuel, 51, 52 Antuca, 324 A punto de despegar [Just About to Take Off], 330, 332, 335, 336 Aquí se construye (o ya no existe ese lugar donde nací) [Under Construction], 332 Arendt, Hannah, 262, 263, 273 Arequipa, 67, 115, 324 Argentina, 117, 135, 246, 250, 273, 284, 298 Armed conflict, 15, 17, 18, 21, 29, 34, 36, 43, 66, 69, 74, 79–81, 90, 93, 104, 106, 108, 117, 181,

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 C. Vich and S. Barrow (eds.), Peruvian Cinema of the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52512-5

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INDEX

183, 184, 186, 189, 191, 193, 201, 202, 204, 239, 250, 252, 257–260, 263, 267, 268, 271, 272, 343, 344 Así se hizo La muralla verde [This is How La Muralla Verde Was Made], 323 ¡Asu Mare!, 13, 29, 41, 48–50, 53, 55, 57–62, 251 ¡Asu Mare! 2, 60 ¡Asu Mare! 3, 61 Audience(s) domestic, 16, 111, 135, 295 metropolitan, 343 Peruvian, 11, 15, 16, 18, 29, 30, 39–41, 48, 61, 106, 122, 131, 221, 223, 226, 238, 239, 293, 345 Western, 145 Auteur, 33, 66, 68, 124, 135, 162, 164, 175, 183, 184, 292, 305, 316, 322, 329 global, 18, 122, 123, 127, 132 Latin American, 127, 130 Aves sin nido [Birds Without a Nest], 152 Av. Larco [Larco Ave.], 43, 218, 220–222, 228, 230, 251, 261 Award, 8, 16, 30, 33, 106, 113, 117, 118, 125, 134, 137, 138, 143, 177, 200, 222, 224, 270, 297, 307, 343, 344 Best Peruvian Film, 121, 128, 345 Ayacuchean, 86, 90, 92–95, 98, 106, 107, 109, 113, 145, 195 audience, 15, 109, 110 cinema, 87, 112, 114 filmmakers, 15, 86, 90, 91 Ayacucho, 15, 23, 65–71, 74, 79, 86–88, 90, 93–95, 98–100, 103–110, 112–118, 125, 144, 192, 195, 201, 203, 205–208,

226, 231, 244, 248–250, 267, 281, 346 Aymara, 18, 82, 143–145, 147–149, 151–155

B BAFICI , 135 Bagua, 201, 210–213 Barbarán, Carolina, 309–311 Barea, María, 322, 324, 338 Batalla del pasado, la [The Battle of the Past], 239 Bayly, Jaime, 240 Berlin International Film Festival , 161 Berlinale, 54, 146 Berrocal, Lucho, 85, 86 Best, Lorena, 2, 6, 20, 323, 329–334, 336–338 Big Bang Films , 12 Boca del lobo, la [The Mouth of the Wolf], 50, 220, 251, 261 Bollywood, 14, 89 Bosque de El Cañoncillo, el [The Forest of El Cañoncillo], 137 Bourdieu, Pierre, 30, 31, 39, 282 Box office, 29, 30, 32, 38, 40–42, 184, 238, 239, 252 Brosens, Peter, 50 Bullying maldito, la historia de María Marimacha [Damned Bullying, the Story of María Marimacha], 15, 65, 70 Buñuel, Luis, 133 Bustamante, Jayro, 145 Butler, Judith, 191, 195

C Cáceres, León, 68 Cachín, 55, 57–61

INDEX

Caídos del cielo [Fallen From Heaven], 240 Calero, Joel, 258, 265, 266, 270, 329 Canción sin nombre [Song Without a Name], 343, 344 Cannes Film Festival , 343 Capitalism, 4, 6, 148, 155–157, 282, 288 Cara del diablo, la [Face of the Devil], 42 Cárdenas, Carlos, 183 Carolina Foundation grant, 270 Carrie, 74, 75 Casa rosada, la [The Pink House], 15, 17, 103–110, 113, 114, 116–118, 218, 226, 227, 229, 230, 261 Casos complejos [Complex Cases], 121, 125, 130–132, 135, 137 Castro, Diana, 20, 323, 325–331, 337, 338 Catacora, Óscar, 143, 145, 147, 148, 155 Cautivas, las [The Captives], 329 Cayumba Cine Production Company, 303 Ccorahua, Martín, 85–88, 91, 93–95, 97–99, 298 CEPRODEP, 185, 195 Chanchada, 52 Chicama, 121, 125, 127, 128, 130, 134, 137 Chicha culture, 176 Chicón, Victoria, 322 Cholo Choledad, 147 Cidade de Deus [City of God], 133 Cine-acto. See New Latin American Cinema (NLAC) Cineaparte, 11 Cineclub, 11, 19, 89, 281, 324, 330, 338

349

Cine Club de la Universidad de Ciencias y Humanidades , 11 Cine de barrio, 124, 134 Cinema law, 116, 280 Cinemateca, 9 Círculo de tiza [Chalk Circle], 329 Ciudad acorralada, la [The Cornered City], 263 Ciudad y los perros, la [The Time of the Hero]. See Vargas Llosa, Mario Collazos, Diana, 328, 329 Colonialism, 146, 152 Comedy, 29, 32, 34, 40, 52–54, 57, 59–61, 221, 228 Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación [Final Report of the Commission of Truth and Reconciliation] (CVR), 79, 183 Comisión de Promoción del Perú para la Exportación y el Turismo, [Commission for the Export and Tourism Campaigns] (PromPerú), 53 Commodification, 24, 147, 167, 175, 225, 280, 296 CONACINE, 87, 113, 118, 127, 239, 281, 296 Condenado, 68, 73, 78, 92, 110, 117 Congrains, Enrique, 239, 240 Coraje [Courage], 261, 262 Costa, Pedro, 18, 127, 283, 332, 333 Crime and Punishment , 240 Criollo, 58 Cueto, Alonso, 17, 239–242, 244, 245, 247–249, 251 Cueto, Vicente, 201, 208 Cultural hybridity, 153 Cultural industry, 222, 251, 270, 271, 290 Cultural intimacy, 15, 104, 107, 111–114, 116

350

INDEX

Cuzco, 100, 106, 150, 265 Cuzqueño, 145, 147, 157

D Decolonization, 292 Decreto de Urgencia 022–2019, 7 Deleuze, Gilles, 285, 287 Delgado Aparicio, Álvaro, 2, 195, 343 Del Solar, Salvador, 60, 218, 219, 222, 223, 231, 247–249, 251 Demonio de los Andes, el [The Demon of the Andes], 68 De Palma, Brian, 74 Department of Tourism and Commerce (Ministerio de Comercio y Turismo), 162 Destino no tiene favoritos, el [Destiny Has No Favorites], 52 D_fecto Barroco, el , 164, 165 Día sin sexo, un [A Day Without Sex], 31, 33, 42 Digital socialism, 286 Dios tarda, pero no olvida [God May Be Late, But Never Forgets], 91, 92, 106, 108 Dirección del Audiovisual, la Fonografía y los Nuevos Medios (DAFO), 117, 118, 143, 270, 281, 296, 305, 307, 308 Documentary, 19, 53, 55, 87, 117, 124, 148, 150, 152, 164–167, 169, 170, 176, 183, 190, 192, 200, 201, 208, 210, 211, 214, 218, 221, 225, 226, 260, 261, 264, 270, 273, 298, 303, 304, 306, 309–317, 322–325, 329–331, 334, 336–338, 344 Dogme 95, 283, 284 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 240 Duty-memory cinema, 217, 227

E Ella y él [About Them], 31, 33, 35, 36, 42 Elsaesser, Thomas, 16, 185 Encina, Paz, 145 En construcción [Work in Progress], 332 Escuela de Cine Amazónico (ECA), 6, 19, 297, 298, 303–309, 312, 315–318 Escuela de la calle, la, 137 Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes , 281 Espinoza, Fernando, 324 Espinoza, Mayra, 309 Eusebio, Mélinton, 15, 65–70, 72–74, 76, 78, 81, 91, 118 Extirpador de Idolatrías [Extirpator of Idolatries], 326 Eyde, Marianne, 251, 264

F Falicov, Tamara, 16, 50 Familia Orozco, la [The Orozco Family], 51 Feminism, 76 feminist film history, 322 Film festival Festival de Cine de Cartagena, 32 Festival de Cine de La Habana, 283 Festival de Cine de Lima, 281–283, 325, 345 Festival de Cine Hecho por Mujeres , 11, 324 Festival de Cine Lima Independiente, 282, 325, 326 Festival de Cine Peruano en Lenguas Originarias , 11 Festival de Cine Pobre de Gibara, 283 Festival de Cortometrajes Expecta-CADE, 125

INDEX

Festival X of Independent Video.. See Trujillo Primera muestra de cine Limeño, 282 Primer Festival de Cine Amazónico, 308 Regional Film Festival of Ayacucho, 65, 70 Forero, Omar, 18, 121–128, 130–138 Foucault, Michel, 5 Fujimori, Alberto, 3, 184, 195, 200, 219, 224, 227, 228, 240–242, 259, 264, 268, 280 Fujimorismo, 242, 268 Fujimorista, 264, 268

G Gálvez, Héctor, 127, 137, 181–186, 188–190, 192, 194, 195, 214 Gálvez Olaechea, Alberto, 263, 264, 273 García, Alan, 3 García Canclini, Néstor, 5 García Espinosa, Julio. See Imperfect Cinema Gavilán, Lurgio, 263, 273 Genette, Gerard, 66, 82 Genre action, 67, 92, 155 comedy. See Comedy horror, 15, 68, 74, 91, 343 martial arts, 67 melodrama, 15, 67 musical, 32, 38 Western, 133 Global North, 217 Global South, 50, 194 Godard, Jean Luc, 283, 297 Gonzales, Luis, 68 Governmentality. See Foucault, Michel Goya Awards, 128, 143, 241

351

Grandes miradas [Knowing Gazes], 240, 241, 243 Gregorio, 89, 324 Grupo Chaski, 11, 57, 329 Grupo Liberación. See Third Cinema Guachimán, 42 Guarango, 124, 136–138 Guerin, José Luis, 283, 332 Guerra, Ciro, 145 Guerrilla cinema, 281

H Hablemos de cine, 21, 51, 322 Hamaca Paraguaya [Paraguayan Hammock], 155 Herralde Prize, 243 Herzfeld, Michael, 104 Hijas de la Violencia [Daughters of War], 324 Historia oficial, la [The Official Story], 250 Historias de Shipibo, 136 Hora azul, la [Before Dawn], 17, 240, 243, 245–251 Hora final, la [The Last Hour], 17, 218–221, 229–231, 258, 262, 267–271 Huamanga, 66, 85, 89, 90, 100, 117, 206, 207, 246, 248, 250 Huanta, 67, 70, 89, 244–249 Hubert Bals Fund, 50 Huertas, José Gabriel, 66, 91 Humala, Ollanta, 3 Human rights, 202, 214, 231, 258–260

I IBERMEDIA, 270, 273 Imperfect Cinema, 292 Inca Castillo, Omar, 309

352

INDEX

Inca, la boba y el hijo del ladrón, el , 137 Incontrastable, la.. See Cineclub Indigenista, 18, 105, 146–148, 150–153, 156, 223 Indigenous Achuar, 306 Amahuaca, 306 Bora, 306 Isconahua, 306 Shipibo-Konibo, 306, 316, 317 Insurgent, 2, 17, 90, 100, 109, 115, 258, 259, 261, 262, 264–266, 270–272 Intimidad de los parques [The Intimacy of Parks], 51 I Spit on Your Grave, 74–77, 81 J James, Henry, 239 Japón, 127 Jiménez, Mary, 324, 325 José Donoso, Camila, 332 Jóvenes Promotores en Derechos Humanos (Young Promoters of Human Rights), 303 Junín, 67, 346 Juventude em marcha [Colossal Youth], 332 K Kaspar, Stefan, 324 kharisiris , 68 Kiarostami, Abbas, 18 Kitano, Takeshi, 132 Kitsch, 166, 225 Kuczynski, Pedro Pablo, 3, 23 Kukuli, 148–152, 157 Kuntur Wachana [Where the Condor Is Born], 317 Kurosawa, Akira, 155

L Lágrimas de fuego [Tears of Fire], 66, 68, 69, 91 Lambayeque, 67 Lecturas, las [The Readings], 329 Lefebvre, Henri, 182, 187 Legaspi, Alejandro, 324 León, Melina, 2, 343, 345 Ley de la Cinematografía Peruana 26370, 7 LGBT, 344 Llanos. Pierre G., 201, 202 Llosa, Claudia, 2, 18, 54, 137, 145, 146, 156, 161–167, 169–171, 174, 175, 177, 195, 205, 214, 218, 222, 231, 343 Locos de amor [Crazy in Love], 31, 33, 36, 38, 42 Locos de amor 2, 31, 33, 38 Lombardi, Francisco J., 40, 42, 50, 130, 137, 200, 220, 240–242, 251 Lombardi, Joanna, 60 Los Shapis , 52 Los Shapis en el mundo de los pobres [The World of the Poor], 52 Lucanamarca, 127, 183, 190, 192

M Machismo, 326 Machuca, 250 Madeinusa, 145, 146, 152, 161, 205 Madueño, Lali, 325, 338 Magallanes , 17, 18, 60, 218, 220, 222, 224, 225, 228, 230, 231, 246–251 Malas intenciones, las [Bad Intentions], 137 Maldición del Inca, la [The Curse of the Inca], 15, 85, 86, 88, 92–94, 97–99

INDEX

Maldonado, Ricardo, 7, 42, 48, 49, 54–57, 60 Mañana te cuento, 42 Mañana te cuento 2, 42 Marca Perú, 4, 7, 13, 48–50, 53–55, 59–61, 162–164, 170, 171, 174, 175, 177, 297 Mar de Copas , 34, 42 Margarita, 42 Margarita 2, 42 María Marimacha, la asesina de los Andes [María Marimacha, The Murderess of the Andes], 69, 76 Mariátegui, José Carlos, 148, 156 Mariposa negra [Black Butterfly], 17, 42, 240–243, 250, 251 Market, 4, 6, 9, 11–15, 17–19, 22, 48, 53, 61, 71, 86, 89, 117, 125, 135, 163, 164, 174, 175, 219, 225, 238, 270, 280, 281, 287, 296, 316 Martel, Lucrecia, 206 Martinez Gamboa, José Antonio, 91 Maruja en el infierno [Maruja in Hell], 240 Marxism, 288, 291 Masculinity, 71, 73, 76, 344 Maysundo, Natalia, 329 Memory, 6, 15–18, 41, 104, 165, 172, 183, 193, 201, 203–211, 214, 217, 218, 222, 239–241, 243–252, 258, 260, 261, 264, 271, 312, 322, 329, 343, 344 Mendoza, Eduardo, 42, 218, 219, 231, 258, 267, 268, 270 Mestizo, 20, 58, 144, 149, 314, 317 Microcines.. See Grupo Chaski Ministerio de Comercio Exterior y Turismo, MINCETUR [Ministry of External Trade and Tourism], 53 Miss Amazonas , 329

353

Miss Universo en el Perú [Miss Universe in Peru], 324 Misterio del Kharisiri, el [The Mystery of the Kharisiri], 91 Mockumentary, 163–168, 170, 176 Monroe, Steven R., 74 Montes Valerio, Lorena, 312, 314 Morales Bermúdez, 57 Muertos, los , 127 Mujeres de El Planeta [Women of El Planeta], 324 Mujer sin cabeza, la [The Headless Woman], 206 Multiculturalism, 153 Multiplex, 11, 13, 15, 30, 33, 68, 70, 122, 200, 238, 239 N Ñaqaq, 110, 117 National cinema, 7, 9, 10, 13, 40, 41, 48, 50, 52, 117, 122, 136, 144, 161–163, 175 Nation branding, 13, 48, 50, 59, 175, 287 Neocolonialism, 291 Neoliberalism, 2, 4–6, 16, 18, 113, 123, 126, 127, 266, 279, 280, 287, 315, 316, 344 New Latin American Cinema (NLAC), 24, 145, 284, 291, 292, 296, 305, 306, 315–318 Nichols, Bill, 312–314 Niño Pepita, el , 162, 163, 165, 166, 168–170, 176 NN: Sin identidad, 189 Nollywood, 14, 89 No quarto da Vanda [In Vanda’s Room], 332 No se lo digas a nadie [Don’t Tell Anyone], 42, 240 No una sino muchas muertes [Not One But Many Deaths], 240

354

INDEX

O Octubre [October], 137 Ojos que no ven [What the Eye Doesn’t See], 42, 240 Olvidados, los [The Young and the Damned], 133 Operation Chavín de Huántar, 259 Ordenador, el [The Organizer], 126 Ossos [Bones], 332 Ozu, Yasujir¯ o, 155 P Pachamama, 149, 151 Paloma de papel [Paper Dove], 17, 218, 220, 224, 230, 261, 262 Paniagua, Valentín, 3 Pantaleón y las visitadoras [Captain Pantoja and the Special Services], 42, 240 Paquete, el , 137 Paraíso [Paradise], 17, 127, 137, 181–183, 185–187, 189–192, 194, 214 Parody, 167, 168, 170, 177 Parra, Lalo, 92 Pasajera, la [The Passenger], 240, 247–249, 251 Patacláun, 48, 54, 55, 57, 59 Pégot-Ogier, Evelyne, 243–247 Película elegante, una [An Elegant Movie], 330 Pérez-Garland, Frank, 13, 31, 33–42 Perrone, Raúl, 283, 297 Peruvian cinema, 283 post-conflict, 283 Peru, Nebraska, 47, 48, 53–56, 59, 60, 62, 177 Peruvian Film Law, 116 Peruvian Motion Picture Press Association (APRECI), 128, 137 Peruwood, 14 Pishtaco, 68, 82, 91, 92, 110, 117

Pomacocha, Vilcashuamán, 69 Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP), 22, 70, 136, 230, 324 Porque quería estudiar [Because I Wanted to Go to School], 324 postmemory, 207, 214, 251, 252 Proyecto de Ley 3304/2018, 7 Puenzo, Luis, 250 Q Qarqacha, el demonio del incesto [Quarqacha, The Demon of Incest], 67–69, 91 Quechua, 62, 95, 96, 144, 145, 148, 151, 154, 157, 202, 222–225, 230, 251, 269, 308, 323 Qué es el cine independiente. See Quispe Alarcón, Eduardo Quio, Kathy, 303, 307, 308, 317 Quispe Alarcón, Eduardo 1, 281, 285, 288, 289 2, 281, 288 3, 281, 285–287, 297 4, 281, 286 5, 281, 289 6, 281, 287, 289, 290, 294, 295 R Raccaya-Umasi, 201, 202, 208 Radstone, Susannah, 245, 250 Rancière, Jacques, 136, 279, 283, 284, 294–296 Rapto, 42 Recordarás Perú, 162, 163, 170, 176, 177 Reminiscencia 2, 201, 202, 205–207 Responso para un abrazo: tras la huella de un poeta [Requiem for an Embrace: In the Footsteps of a Poet], 323

INDEX

Retina Latina, 128, 138 Reúne, 190 Revolución y la tierra, la [Land and Revolution], 292, 298, 343, 344 Reyes, Jorge, 51 Reygadas, Carlos, 127 Rincón de los inocentes, el [The Innocents’ Corner], 91, 92, 108, 113 Ritual Yanesha para convertirse en mujer [Yanesha Ritual to Become a Woman], 304, 312 Rocha, Glauber, 292, 339 Rodar contra todo [Rolling Strong], 329 Romantic comedy (Rom-Com), 13, 31, 32, 40, 42, 52 Runan Caycu [I Am a Man], 317, 323

S Sangre Inocente [Innocent Blood], 91, 108 Shaw, Deborah, 138, 223, 225 Shining Path [Sendero Luminoso], 2, 57, 62, 79, 90, 91, 93, 104, 107–110, 124, 183, 195, 202, 205, 206, 208, 219, 221, 222, 224, 228–231, 240, 259–261, 263, 264, 267–271, 273 Sibila, 264, 273 SIN, 241–243 Sin compasión [Without Compassion], 240 Slow cinema, 146, 155, 285, 297 Soga Producciones, la, 32 Solás, Humberto, 283, 297 Solos , 60 Solo te puedo mostrar el color, 201, 210, 211 Sontag, Susan, 193

355

T Tarata, 137, 261 Te juro amor eterno [I Swear to Love You Forever], 68 Terrorism, 115, 227, 273 terruqueo, 227, 228 Teta asustada, la [The Milk of Sorrow], 17, 54, 137, 145, 146, 161, 214, 218, 222, 343 Third Cinema, 292, 330 Toledo, Alejandro, 3 Tondero Films , 32, 48, 50, 60 Torrico, Juan Carlos, 52 Transcinema, 324–328, 338 Transnational, 9, 19, 21, 48, 50, 51, 53, 55, 123, 138, 182–185, 187, 194, 211, 220, 280, 282, 331, 338 Transtextuality, 66, 81 Tristeza andina, 153 Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), 258–260, 263–265, 268, 272, 273 Twenty-first century Peruvian cinema, 4, 121, 125

U Última noticia, la [The Latest News], 261, 329 Última tarde, la [One Last Afternoon], 17, 117, 258, 262, 265, 266 Uma, cabeza de bruja [The Witch’s head], 92 Universidad Católica Sedes Sapientiae - Nopoki (UCSS), 312, 313, 315 Universidad Nacional Intercultural de la Amazonia (UNIA), 309, 312 Un nuevo cine peruano, 282

356

INDEX

V Valdivia Gómez, Fernando, 303 Valdivia, Juan Carlos, 145 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 56, 62, 239, 240 Velázquez, Sofía, 325, 338 Vélez, Judith, 218, 338 VHS, 89, 112, 125 Vida da vueltas, la [Life Turns Around], 125, 137 Vidas paralelas [Parallel Lives], 230, 261, 262 Vílchez, Fernando, 201, 211 Vizcarra, Martín, 3, 7, 23 Volver a ver [Seeing Again], 17, 218, 219, 221, 225, 226, 228, 230

W Wakcha, 201–204, 206, 208 Willakuy, 68 Wiñaypacha [Eternity], 18, 143–156 Wood, Andrés, 250 Woodworth, Jessica, 50 World Cinema Fund, 50 Y Yuyanapaq, 193, 218, 219, 225, 250 Yuyarichani [I Am Remembering], 329 Z Zarchi, Meir, 74