Colombian
Digital Popular Cinema
Reflections on Violence and Culture
MA Thesis Films Studies
University of Amsterdam
Presented by
Luisa Fernanda González Valencia
Student No. 11575301
luisa.gonzalezvalencia@student.uva.nl
Advisor
dr. E.S. (Emiel) Martens
e.s.martens@uva.nl
Amsterdam, Netherlands
June 28 2019
Index
Index 2
Chapter I 7
Early Colombian cinema 10
The turn to reality. Cinema in the Mid XX Century 18
Globalization and No Future. Cinema at the end of the XX Century 24 Pluralization of Discourses. A new cinema in the XXI Century 30
Chapter II 36
La Gorra (2007) [The Cap] 39
Ajuste de Cuentas (2009) [Settling Scores] 40
El Parche (2009) [The Gang] 42
El Desplazado (2011) [The Displaced] 43
Low-cost cinema production and crossings with reality 45
Popular digital cinema and crossings with capitalist hegemony 48
Mainstream narratives and allegiance with the main characters 53
Repetition and accumulation, rather than cause and effect 54
Allegiance 55
Generic pleasure and cultural interdiction 56
Local and social aspects of the films 58
Small segregated cities 59
Female characters 63
Lost youths 65
Crime vs. Legality 67
Conclusions 72
References 74
Online films list and comments 78
Introduction
For the past eight years I’ve been trying to create a proper environment for a cinema industry. The last three years I've been doing myself the cinema capitalists won’t do. Every New Year's eve I have told myself ‘this year the cinema industry the country needs so much will be born’. But the wicked cinema refuses to be born, and it is 1949 and I found myself here in Itagüí, setting up workshops hoping that ‘now’ cinema will be born, the most unlucky sibling in the national industries
Camilo Correa, Video El Colombiano, January 9th 1949
In Martínez (1978, 169)
Colombian cinema history, or the idea of a national cinema in this country, has been shaped by industrial values and the recognition of films by intellectual and artistic elites. Films outside those spheres tend to get invisible in the narrative of a national cinema and what it can provide ーframes for actions, or reflections on the culture and memories of a place, to name a few examples.
While the history of Colombian cinema continues to be written under the frames mentioned above ーwhere it would hardly be a robust and constant storyー, the reality of cinema in the country is also occurring in the voids and cracks of the system: using simple technologies for its
production, distributed in alternative venues as online platforms and video stalls of street markets, and exhibited in community halls, streets, or online platforms.
As Salazkina and Fibla-Gutierrez suggest “film history becomes, then, not a tale of technological/aesthetic advances culminating (or, according to others, reaching its nadir) in the new media, but a global and transversal reexamination of the uses and circulation of moving images, best understood as specific instantiations of the cinema apparatus in different historical and geopolitical contexts” (XI).
This thesis proposes an exercise for broadening the history of Colombian cinema by including digital films that have no place in the official narrative of what is or has been cinema in Colombia, but are very popular among a large audience reached through the video stalls of street markets and online platforms. It is an opportunity to talk about them from a cultural analysis perspective ーexamining their ways production and circulation, and their audience reception. The four films chosen are La Gorra (2007), Ajuste de Cuentas (2009), El Parche (2009),and El Desplazado (2011),which I found after visiting the video stalls of downtown Cali once a week during a six months period in 2016 . Violence is the main element in all the films, it 1 is related to the socio-political context of Colombia, but also responds to the fetishization of violence mass media and mainstream cinema have produced. Understanding violence as a force that deeply transforms society, and how it is being culturally apprehended by Colombian popular cinema is a transversal issue to this analysis.
1 The research in 2016 was part of the production of a television documentary: Cine Digital Popular (2016), which I wrote and directed for Telepacífico. Thanks to this first research on the field I managed to count with interviews with the directors and video stalls’ owners.
In the first chapter, I will delve into how the image of violence has been created and transformed in the country. From early cinema, where the first film production made and censored was already related to a violent fact taken from real life ーthe murder of a political leader in Drama en el 15 de Octubre (1915)ー, and where the imperialist and modernist input of cinema promoted ideals of a wealthy and geographically beautiful nation, instead of looking at the political and social situation going on ーan internal war, the loss of the Panama Canal, and the Banana Massacre, among other events. During the early cinema period a historical distance between Colombian cinema and its local audience was created and only started to be shortened in the middle of the XXth century. When a transformation on the political uses of cinema emerged all over the world, Colombian filmmakers started narrating the ongoing violence the country was living in ーaroused at the end of the 1940s with the period called La Violencia, whose wounds can easily be still traced. This chapter will continue with the end of the XXth century to nowadays, with the development of digital technologies that made more possible than ever a cinema produced from the cracks and voids of a system formulated within neocolonial agendas by artistic, economic, and intellectual elites. New voices and perspectives of the country, the historical and systemic violence, and of cinema itself emerged ーfrom grass-roots video productions coming from indigenous communities or urban populations, to more popular uses which add hegemonic aspects to the narration of violence in Colombia; some examples are the first pornographic company and its transversal linkage with the narco culture of Cali, or individuals that gather their communities for the production of a gangster film that narrates a real fact or a concern particular to those people.
In the second chapter, popular digital films become the center of the analysis aiming to locate them as part of contemporary Latin American popular culture ーbeing important to read their
connections to hegemonic narratives, and recognize them as embedded in capitalistic flows. I initially present their stories and independent ways of production, to then examine them together under different transversal aspects. Firstly as low-budget films that take elements of the real such as true stories, and issues that matter to the community and the filmmaker who is a mediator of the context they are narrating. Secondly, I present the way they are embedded in hegemonic narratives, social constructions as patriarchy, and how they relate to hegemonic capitalistic flows such as the fetishization of violenceーeven when circulating in alternative ways as are the video stalls of downtown Cali and online platforms. Finally, I analyze common content elements that permit political readings of the films, like their perspective of power, gender, and ideas of the future for communities shaped in and living close to violence. In this chapter, I will make use of the filmmakers’ testimonies gathered from a series of Q&As I organized as director of the Cinemateca of Universidad del Valle, and of the comments users of online platforms have made of the films. Those elements contribute to reinforce the analysis I make from a cultural perspective of the films ーhow they are produced as part of a local and a global (hegemonic) culture, and what is the response, the dialogues, and reflections they produce in their audience.
For the conclusions of this thesis, I will propose possible future panorama for this cinema and research on it. I will consider the decrease of video stalls and the displacement of the audience to online platforms, and the search of the filmmakers to join more economically established systems of filmmaking. About the future of its research, I will propose other possible readings these kinds of films can offer about Colombian society and the importance of their preservation as part of national film culture.
Chapter I
The History Shared by Colombian Violence
and Cinema
In the Republic of Colombia in South America, an official State of Emergency has been in force, now on, now off, now and again, for as long as most people can remember.
The Nervous System Talking Terror 2 Michael Taussig (2008)
Cinema, like all the cultural, political, and social spheres in Colombia, has been marked by violence (Villaveces-Izquierdo 306). For more than a century, changes in the technologies for cinema production and new generations of filmmakers have been transforming the depictions of violence in the country. From modernity 一with the arrival of cinema and its beginnings一 to globalization 一an era of digital technologies that permitted an increase in production and the emergence of different voices一, Colombian cinema has gone from rejection and denial of the violent reality oppressing large communities to a political cinema that denounced such crimes. Nowadays, depictions of violence are overproduced by large national and international media industries that found good revenue in narco-stories. Representations of violence in the country have also emerged from communities in the margins of the official discourse of cinema: since
the 1990s, filmmakers from popular sectors and grass-roots organizations have been denouncing, creating memories through digital technologies and contributing to the shaping of an audience eager to consume images and stories on Colombian violence.
Kantaris (2008) explains violence in Colombia as an act of historical, geographic, and figurative displacement, moving from decade to decade, from the countryside to the cities, from a tragic fact to a fetich (455). In the 1980s, a group of academics called violentólogos [violentologists] studied for the first time Colombian violence as an act of multiplication and dissemination in the twentieth century. They proposed three different periods: the first one is referred to as Violencia original [original Violence] and began in 1948 with El Bogotazo ー a large riot that followed the assassination of popular leader and presidential candidate, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. This pivotal moment took place in a period known as La Violencia which consisted in the escalation of the already existing war between liberals and conservatives and would eventually lead to the creation of armed revolutionary forces such as FARC and ELN. The second period of violence marks the rise and strengthening of guerrillas and paramilitary groups, whose war caused the displacement of massive populations from the countryside to the cities since the 1970s. The third period of violence takes place in the cities, where the large communities displaced from their territories found themselves excluded in poverty, unemployment or exploitation. These marginalized communities were largely important for the establishment of the drug cartels as political and social forces, since drug lords gave them the sustainability that legal systems were not able to guarantee. Kataris proposes a fourth period of violence, globalización de la violencia [globalization of violence]: “the result of the displacement of traffic, bribery, and money laundry operations to countries like Mexico, Italy, Russia and the United States, along with a massive migration that overgrows the national frontiers” (456).
Colonial violence should be considered an early chapter in the violent history of this nation, since the arrival of Spanish colonizers. But it is important to note that colonialism continues to be in the bottom of all violent periods, as a motor for all what has occured, evolving into different forms of neocolonialism. For example, many of the lands left behind by peasants that were displaced to the cities are now owned by extractivist companies or used for the monoculture of sugar cane or wax palm 一resources marketed internationally by national or international companies. Since early periods of violence, the local oligarchy has held a close relationship with colonial powers oppressing Colombian society. Drug trafficking, run by people mainly outside of legitimate powers, is only possible in a neocolonial relation where the main markets and consumers are found in developed countries. Finally, neocolonialism is also a force that transforms and dictates what happens with cinema in the country, since its beginnings up until contemporary practices, as I will argue further in different parts of this chapter.
The peace agreement signed between former president Juan Manuel Santos and FARC ーthe oldest guerrilla in the worldー was a sign of hope for the end of violence in Colombia. But the on-going assassinations of hundreds of social leaders by the paramilitary group Águilas Negras [Black Eagles] continue to add up without any judicial response or prevention plan. The current president, Iván Duque, who has as mentor former president Álvaro Uribe ーinvestigated for the Aro and La Granja Massacres, witness tampering, illegal wiretapping and persecution of human rights defenders, among other crimesー wants to bring down the peace agreement. There is a big division between Colombians that want the end of the conflict through conciliation and others who continue to defend a military response. During the referendum for the peace agreement with FARC ーwhere people were asked if they supported the agreement between
the government and the guerrilla to foster a “stable and lasting peace”ーmost people at historically conflicted war zones voted YES. Meanwhile at the cities, where people have second-hand experienced war, particularly through the media, NO won as it did overall. In Colombia the media, and cinema in particular, have played a role in fostering divisions through representations of war in terms of good guys and bad guys. As at the violencia original, divisions are only convenient for political and economic powers, and media can have an important role in transforming that reality or endorsing it.
The periodization of Colombian violence is useful to understand the relation one period has with the other. But it is important not to read violence as a natural flow of causes and effects, but as a system that has deep repercussions in people’s lives; a system of representations, as argues Kantaris (456), that can help us understand the transformations violence has made in society. The analysis of cinema and its different depictions of Colombian violence help us in that endeavor.
Early Colombian cinema
Just as violence, cinema in Colombia is an act of displacement. As it came with modernity, it brought a whole new set of cultural perspectives that moved others. It was an imperialist force, as Ella Shohat and Robert Stam state: “the most prolific film-producing countries of the silent period ーBritain, France, the US, Germanyー also ‘happened’ to be among the leading imperialist countries, in whose clear interest it was to laud colonial enterprise” (Shohat & Stam
100). This is how cinema came to Colombia, where already in 1898 “it could be admired in a good grade of perfection” (Latorre qtd. In Martínez 17). The Italian Di Domenico Brothers were among the first to bring and distribute European films from 1909 to 1928, doing some of the first films shot in Colombia as well.
The first films made in Colombia were short documentaries called views for its function in2 portraying landscapes, mimicking the act of looking. Films as Puerto Cambao, Parque Centenario, Carreteras en el Magdalena, or Panorama de San Cristobal were screened in a program at Teatro Bogotá in May 16th of 1907 (Martínez 39). The fact that these first films were to outline the geography of the country sets a connection with the imperialist project, which coincides with the beginning of cinema in the world. Early cinema, within an imperialist project, relied upon the configuration of the New World as the “space available for the play of the virile [white] spectatorial imagination of a kind of mental Lebensraum” (Shohat & Stam 101). The pictorial of the country as geographical paradise is something that has been embraced since early Colombian cinema and is still happening now. It works not only as a colonialist imaginary, but also in the process of shaping an idea of nationhood that tries to hide the political and social violence the country has been immersed in for decades.
This tendency to hide violence determined the destiny of Drama del 15 de Octubre [Drama on October 15th] (1915), the first film made in Colombia by the Di Domenico Brothers. This film was a reenactment of political leader Rafael Uribe Uribe’s murder shot in the real location where it took place and having as actors the two actual murderers, Leovigildo Galarza and Jesús Carvajal. Only a few frames of the film remain. Research on it has been based on newspapers and other archives from that time. Available materials permit to research “issues that still
2 Views were very common on early cinema, having its origins in “painting, stereography, topographical photography, and postcard views” (DeLassus 124).
pervade Colombian filmmaking today: representations of violence, contradictory receptions by Colombian audiences of national filmmaking, and the vicissitudes of production and distribution” (Suárez 18).
Newspapers, majors of different cities and the Uribe Uribe family banned the film ーwhich eventually lead to the disappearance of all its copiesー. They alleged it was immoral and was being used to profit off the memory of the politician (Martínez 41). If in contemporary Colombia films made with people that are part or close to criminal nets cause intense moralistic debates ーas those made by Victor Gaviria, or some of the amateur filmmakers that constitute my main corpus of analysisー, a 1915 film that showed the men who dared to kill a hero from the Thousand Days War with axes outside the capitol must have represented an enormous threat. Drama on October 15thwas the beginning of a path in the representation of the other,the one who stands beyond the margins. Even if the film is gone, it plays a role in the shaping of memories and discourses that have woven representations of Colombia through cinema.
Frame of the only scene preserved of Drama on October 15th. Retrieved from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_drama_del_15_de_octubre#/media/File:Escena_El_drama_del_15_de_octubre.jp g on June 27 2019
Films after Drama on October 15th were based on canonical novels such as María (1922) or Aura o las Violetas (1924). As Juana Suárez suggests, this guaranteed the reception of the audience but also reinforced the shaping of a national identity where literature was already seen as cultural heritage (Suárez 18). As Shohat and Stam explain, before cinema “print capitalism” functioned through novels and newspapers “to produce and heighten national identity, both accompanying and crystallizing the rise of nations by imposing a unitary topos on heterogeneous languages and diverse desires” (Shohat and Stam 102). Such intentions were inherited by the early, uncensored Colombian cinema. What we see in films as Alma Provinciana [Soul of the Province] (1926), and Bajo el Cielo Antioqueño [Under the Skies of Antioquia] (1925) ーtwo of the few films preserved in their totality ー are bourgeoise characters 3 that experience love dramas, where patriarchy and chastity are set on play as instructions for the audience. Factories and cities are important locations for these films, reminding us that modernity was coming to transform the country and its culture through cinema. As Suárez proposes in her analysis of Bajo el Cielo Antioqueño : “what really takes place under the skies of Antioquia and at the heart of the narrative is the flow of capital” (23). In these films, the countryside is a land owned by the bourgeoisie, where peasants serve to depict traditional dances.
3“[Colombia] as in other regions of Latin America (along with Europe and the United States), the dearth of surviving material makes it difficult to examine those years. As Ana M. López has noted, film production from that period between 1896 and 1930 has suffered inevitable losses due to the ‘ravages of time (and fires) and the official neglect of cultural preservation. Scholarship on this period is necessarily tenuous, limited to a few dozen extant films, and for the most part is based on secondary materials and press coverage’ ” (Suárez, 17).
Frame of Bajo el Cielo Antioqueño. Retrieved from http://umcentral.umanizales.edu.co/index.php/2019/04/09/19817/ on June 27 2019.
The representation of the other that inhabits the margins of the modern cities is only seen in Bajo el Cielo Antioqueño when a black boy (played by a white child with a painted face) is crashed by Alvaro, the main character, who carries the boy in his arms and puts him inside of the car. Soon a crowd of black people gather as witnesses of this act, but this appearance also4 shows that they were already present in the streets of Medellín. At his house, Alvaro instructs his servant to feed the kid and to treat him as if he was himself. The boy then transforms into the white master as he starts to order food, fres-kola ,5 and a cigar, but his manners while eating reveal him as a “savage” (Suárez 24). The depiction of the otherworks to reinforce the idea of
4“Rushed to repair his mischief taking the miserable to his house” as written in the intertitles of the film. 5 Brand of soda that was the beginning of Postobón the biggest national capital for the production of sugary drinks, which is located in Antioquia. References and the use as locations of other Antioquian industries as Coltejer (Colombian Textil Company) and Coltabaco (Colombian Tabaco Company) function inBajo el Cielo Antioqueño as a way to “accentuate the ‘ paisa-rhythm’ and confirm the economic strength of the region, which resisted identification with the belated and traumatic process of modernization characterizing the rest of the Colombia” (Suárez, 23).
the white bourgeoisie as a Christian charitable soul, and the other, the black boy who lives in the street, as someone who would take advantage when removed from subordination. Suárez reminds us that the black population in Antioquia “was fundamental for confirming the exceptional nature of paisa region” by working in the gold mines and fields where they were even more marginalized (24). Representations of black people in films and TV series keep being a place for racism in contemporary Colombia. The confinement of black communities to regions and urban areas where they lack proper health system, education, transportation, dignified work, among other basic needs, prevail.
The modernist project that was coming with cinema in Colombia was then interested in looking at the reality of the high classes, who both sponsored them and provided the actors and actresses. It was a cinema Hernando Martínez Pardo called desvinculado [disconnected], because it had no relation with the political and social violence that was being experienced by most of its spectators (Martínez 57). Colombia was coming from a Civil War that ended in 1902 and that was the political-economical breach for the separation with Panama and the stealing of the Canal in 1903. Peasants and workers in particular experienced significant struggles, which ended up in the Banana Massacre in 1928 when around 3.000 United Fruit Company workers on strike were killed in open fire by police forces during two days. Those conflicts and difficult political and social situations were completely invisible in the cinema of those days, but not to most Colombians who soon lost their interest in national film productions.
In contrast, the main cinema producing countries in Latin America ーBrazil, Argentina, and Mexicoー were making films based on popular culture, journalistic chronicles, dramas occurring to peasants or to the people living in the peripheries of cities. Looking at the reality of the vast
majority of their population led to the success of their industries (Martínez 164-165). Since this wasn’t happening in Colombia, when Hollywood films burst through in 1922 Colombian audiences and distributors were an easy prey (Martínez 62).
Hollywood brought its depiction of violence (westerns, persecutions, and adventures), comedies full of gags, and simplistic melodramas (Martínez 62), lower prices for rental copies which could be “dumped” into countries as Colombia because the costs of the films were already covered in their local market (Shohat & Stam 30). Amongst many others, there was a displacement of taste: Colombian audiences were no longer interested in films that depicted high classes with the tableaux formula influenced by French and Italian melodramas, nor in literary adaptations. The project of a national cinema industry was displaced as well, since making films in Colombia became an economic adventure that often ended in bankruptcy. Distributors decided to secure their income by showing Hollywood films over the local production ーan issue that continues to be relevant today.
The only local production that kept on going after Hollywood’s arrival, not producing losses but income till the end of the 1960s, were the newsreels, an important part of Colombian cinema history : cameramen traveled around the country registering political acts, the visit of6 international artists or politicians, the still on fashion views of the geography, daily life in the cities, and also violent successes such as theBogotazo in 1948. Newsreels were very popular among Colombian audiences (Martínez 83) because they could see themselves on the screen, an act of apparition denied by all the other forms of cinema available.
6 Arturo Acevedo Vallarino and his sons were the most relevant filmmakers within the production of newsreels. Their films have been recently preserved by Patrimonio Fílmico Colombiano, and in 2018 were declared World Memory for Latin American and the Caribean by UNESCO.
Between 1946 and 1960 many production companies appeared with a clear intention to make a “positive image” of the country to be shown abroad. Martínez Pardo quotes Hans Bückner in his assessment of how Colombia could develop an industry in 1950 through portraying its “beautiful landscapes, pretty women, great folklore, good culture, etc” (169).
Since national productions lacked local support, some of them began to target international audiences and were being produced by advertising companies financed by other companies such as Avianca Airlines. Some of the films produced were Carnaval de Barranquilla, Concurso Nacional de Belleza [National Beauty Contest],Conozcamos el Río Magdalena [Let’s Know the Magdalena River] which followed Bücker’s early quoted assessment. The state was the other supporter of cinema during that period through the Ninth Law of 1942, which clearly stated that cinema should promote the good image of the country, and consequently invested in propaganda films. Such is the case of Marco Tulio Lizarazo’s unfinished film with the president 7 Gustavo Rojas Pinilla. The film intended to show the country’s transformation under the military government: it produced a before and after progression from images of violence, desolated lands, and unemployment in the cities, to working peasants, a blossomed countryside, and the guerrilla pacification (Martínez 179).
7 When Lizarazo was searching for someone that would finance the sound post-production of the film he gave it to different laboratories, where pieces of material got lost. Finally, he ended up selling the footage (Martínez, 179).
The turn to reality. Cinema in the Mid XX Century
In the mid-1950s three films foresaw a change that would come in the 1960s with more force. Hernando Martínez Pardo called this moment a “New Tendency” since it brought new narratives ーbeyond proselytism and the promoting of the country as a geographical paradiseー, the appearance of TV actors and actresses instead of their radio colleagues, and a significant interest in the examination of “living conditions” (198). As Suárez remarks of Martínez’s analysis, those films were “the product of a style that mixes fictional and documentary features” (Martínez qtd. In Suárez 124). Those films were La Langosta Azul[The Blue Lobster] (1954) a surrealistic film where a man wanders in the streets of Barranquilla searching for a blue lobster and through his journey we see the daily life of the city; La Gran Obsesión[The Great Obsesion] (1955),described by Martínez as a psychological film where we see for the first time a peasant that moves to the city because of a countryside that has been transformed by violence, and the commodities that urban areas promise; and El Milagro de la Sal [The Salt’s Miracle] (1958) a melodrama performed by real workers of a salt mine (197-198).
During the 1960s, new directors emerge with a more constant production, clearer intentions to propose their own narratives and a growing interest in creating social reflections about the country. Some of them studied cinema abroad and returned to the country ; others were 8 immigrants such as José María Arzuaga, a Spanish director that came to Colombia running from Francisco Franco’s dictatorship. Arzuaga did the first Colombian production taken to the
8 In this period Gabriela Samper became known as the first woman directing in Colombia. Her work was made between the United States and Colombia, and for its content and way of working through colectivos
Pesaro Film Festival:Pasado el Meridiano [Post Meridian] (1966). The film is a sharp critique on advertising companies in Colombia living in a facade of wealth supported by exploited people ー those same advertising companies that were producing most of the Colombian cinema for the past three decades.
Pasado el Meridiano. Retrieved from
https://www.idartes.gov.co/sites/default/files/styles/juicebox_small/public/2018-08/Pasado%20el%20meridiano%20de %20Jose%20Mar%C3%ADa%20Arzuaga_1%20-%20BAJA.png?itok=iNaMzuXd On June 27 2019
Pesaro Film Festival changed the international reception of Latin American films, which by the 1960s were turning more and more belligerent. For Colombian government and directors, having their films at international venues has always been very relevant. Ever since the 1970s, state financing for cinema has reduced the debt of those filmmakers that show their films at international film festivals, and filmmakers always try to premiere their films abroad. International film festivals work as “quality marks” that tend to reinforce the colonial characteristic cinema has
had since its beginnings. According to De Valck’s periodization of film festivals, from the foundation of the Venice Film Festival in 1932 ーunder the government of Benito Mussoliniー to the Cannes Festival of 1968, these venues were programmed with films sent by state agents under the idea of cinema as a national good, a promoter of the good image of a country, and of good relations between nations (27-28). Here we can understand why promoters of Colombian cinema during the 1940s and 50s believed that the landscapes and beautiful women were the answer for the existence of Colombian cinema. Critic, businessman, and filmmaker Camilo Correa wondered in 1947: “Would Colombia be able to show up at the next Cannes Film Festival? Isn’t there a filmmaker capable of putting our country in the cinematic map of the world?” (Martínez 168).
But only the depiction of violence and the critical political and social situation of the country made possible for Colombian films to reach international venues. When Pesaro and other film festivals started to show New Latin American cinema in the 1970s, ーlocal film industries that in Cuba, Argentina, and Bolivia had their own manifestos declaring cinema as a “weapon” to fight against imperialismー Colombia also had its opportunity to confirm its existence in the world cinema map.
Even when Colombian filmmakers did not produce any manifesto to recognize themselves as part of the movements of political cinema occurring at the end of the 1960s and 70s in the continent, we could place Marta Rodríguez and Jorge Silva’s work among those emancipatory cinemas . Their first film, 9 Chircales (1972) [The Brickmakers], is an in-depth work with a family
9 Rodríguez and Silva at the Second Festival of New Latin American Cinema at Mérida, Venezuela, in 1968 found out that their working method was related to other filmmakers as Jorge Sanjinés, Fernando Birri, and Miguel Litín. That their formal approaches were similar to cinema novo in Brazil, imperfect cinema in Cuba, third cinema in Argentina, and liberation cinema in Bolivia and Argentina (Suárez, 70). A work that was initially influenced by Jean Rouch ー with whom Rodríguez had studied in France ー and by the films of Robert Flaherty, took a more direct political path at that encounter. In Mérida, they confirmed their desire of doing a political cinema that aimed for the transformation of Colombian reality.
that labored in the periphery of Bogotá as in a latifundium ー living in the working place and under the rules of the landowner, where even children had to do really heavy work for a miserable salary10. While filming Chircales,they suspended the shooting to go with the Guahiba and Sikuani indigenous communities who were being murdered and abused. Planas: Testimonio de un Etnocidio (1971) [Plains, Testimony of an Ethnocide ], is the first film produced in the country with a “narration of urgency (...) first testimony of massacre in Colombia after 500 years of systematic extermination, and is the first work were indigenous people appear as they really are” (Cruz Carvajal qtd, in Suárez 107) . These early works were followed by an11 extensive filmography ーJorge Silva died in 1987 but Marta Rodríguez is still activeー which in Suárez opinion is “a legacy of images and testimonios [sic] that are extremely important for the reassessment of history” (Suárez 106).
"Chircales" de Marta Rodríguez & Jorge Silva © Jorge Silva. Retrieved from
https://www.forumdesimages.fr/les-programmes/100-doc-colombie/colombie-regards-feminins_2 on June 27 2019
10Interesting of this work is how the filmmakers only use as voice over the one of the characters. There is no omniscient voice illustrating intellectual revolutionary thoughts, as was usual at different films from the New Latin American Cinema, but the people themselves reflecting about their lives, talking from their experiences and needs.
11Plains functioned as a legal probe for sending to prison some of the responsible for the atrocities that were being committed against those indigenous communities (Suárez, 170).
International recognition of a Latin American cinema that portrayed communities who lived in the periphery of modern cities in complete state abandonment, led also to an over-exploitation of the image of those others by filmmakers from intellectual elites, that were able to get international recognition through their films.
That was the case of Gamín(1977) [Waif], by Ciro Durán. After the success of Chircales, he did a feature documentary with waif children in Bogotá after six months working at the Red Cross, where he gained the kids’ trust. The film over-exploits the figure of the children, showing them repetitively asking for money, sleeping on the streets, and sniffing glue. Gamín has a voice-over that explains Colombian political and social context pairing with the voice of some of the characters that talk about the misery of their lives. This film was the most internationally recognized Colombian production in the 1970s ー starting as a medium-length film, Durán was able to get international financing for having a second shooting that made the project a feature (Suárez 74). A 1981 interview in Cuadernos de Cine Colombiano confronts Durán with questions about the reception of his work: “Colombian critics didn’t accept Gamín. They said it was a sensasionalist film, where viewers’ senses were inflamed with edited images of waifs, just as pornography inflames the senses with images of sex. They talked of pornomiseria, of dishonesty" (Ciro Durán; emphasis on the original). For the director, such critiques had more to do with resentment among the journalistic and artistic community at his success abroad” (Suárez 74).
Gamín by Ciro Durán. Retrieved from http://www.proimagenescolombia.com/photos/57150_35_imagen__.jpg on June 27 2019
Just as Suárez, I want to outline here the term pornomiseria[misery+porn] that became popular after Gamín, used by Durán himself, and is still used in Colombian cinema circles to examine how the image of the marginal, the victim, or the other is made. It’s a term that has been largely used by Luis Ospina and Carlos Mayolo, co-directors of Agarrando Pueblo (1978) [The Vampires of Poverty ]. As the English name of the film indicates, we watch a documentary crew that moves around the streets of Cali with a 16mm camera looking for “scenes of misery” for “German television”. The Vampires of Poverty is a mockumentary, a direct critic to Durán’s Gamín, but also to the short films that were being produced under the Surcharge Law . This 12 law was intended to stimulate the exhibition of Colombian films by giving a surcharge per ticket
12Suárez suggests howThe Vampires of Poverty did not escape from taking advantage of the otherliving in poverty for pursuing international recognition, since the film and its directors ended up traveling to different film venues, winning prices, and selling the film to German distributors. They “aspired to a different relationship with the European film apparatus, but it was not less dependent than the relationship of those who profess and practice pornomiseria filmmaking” (78).
that would be shared by the exhibitors, distributors, and producers. Under the Surcharge law, more than 400 short films were produced. Some of them were relevant reflections of the country and the first works in cinema of filmmakers who would become important in the next decades. But many were films produced by the exhibitors themselves, who found a way to triple win by producing, distributing, and exhibiting. Several short films depicting topics related to violence and inequality, widely available just by walking the streets of any Colombian main city, were made under this logic. They used the documentary formula on fashion at that time: an intellectual voice over denouncing social inequality.
Globalization and No Future. Cinema at the end of the XX
Century
In consonance with worldwide change, the construction of the image of violence took a different tone during the 1980s. “The fall of the Berlin Wall and the Cold War, predicts a new world order that in Latin America is manifested by the defeat of the revolutionary project and the strength of the neoliberal model” (León 15).
León proposes four aspects that lead to the crises of the New Latin American Cinemas. First, the crisis of the national culture. In a more globalized society, the idealization the New Cinemas had of the national in order to give a “unitary battle” is disputed. “The New Latin American Cinema, when proposing an essentialist defense of the national culture, ignored the capacity of
appropriation and interchange of the subaltern-groups and the popular culture” (Canclini qtd. in León 21). Second, the dismantling of the State. Neoliberalism as the new order manifests in the under-financing of government organisms to support cinema. In Colombia, FOCINE followed the Surcharge law in 1978 but by in 1993 this organism would be dismantled for over a decade where the state didn’t support cinema. Third, the end of utopia with the defeat of the socialist dream and a following discursive crisis. “The element that seemed to organize visual statements disappears, provoking a symbolic crisis. Now Latin American cinema will make use of this absence as one of its topics: the lack of sense and social bond, the impossibility of a future.” (León 22). Fourth, the crisis of cinema’s modernity. There is a proliferation of images that tackle the idea of authorship that is so important for modern cinema. Television, video-games, and the Internet made difficult the idea New Latin American Cinemas had: cinema against capitalism (23).
The work of director Víctor Gaviria with people living in the Medellín comunas [peripheral neighborhoods] becomes very relevant of this period and the new depictions of violence and otherness. In Rodrigo D. No Futuro (1990) [Rodrigo D. No Future ] and La Vendedora de Rosas [The Rose Seller] (1998) he gathers the unrest of the city under the influence of Medellín’s Cartel, by creating films with youngsters and children that first-hand experienced violence and segregation towards comunas’ inhabitants since the 1970s. Kids who grew up in poverty and exclusion as the second or third generation of the peasants who were forcefully displaced from their lands into the cities. Working with this community Gaviria creates “drifting characters, co-narratives of the crisis that these people live in the streets where they were subject to violence” (León 49).
Rodrigo D No Futuro by Victor Gaviria. Retrieved from
http://www.proimagenescolombia.com/photos/57150_124_imagen__.jpg on June 27 2019
Fictional films with people living in the margins of the [failed] modern cities became a constant in many Latin American films since the turn to Globalization . Cinema of Marginality, as called by 13 León, makes “the orphans, the forgotten, the unemployed, the criminal its main characters” (13).
The use of video as a supporting format for cinema made possible the emergence of low-budget productions coming from outside of artistic or intellectual elites. A cinema coming from popular classes, showing their tastes 一shaped mainly by mass media or Hollywood narratives一, and their contexts 一small cities and towns mostly, where an audiovisual production could emerge
13Films as Ratas, Ratones y Rateros [Rats, mice, shoplifters] (Ecuador, 1999),Pizza, Birra y Faso [Pizza,
Beer, and Cigarettes] (Argentina, 1997), El Callejón de los Milagros[Alley of Miracles ] (Mexico, 1995),
Subterráneos [Underground] (Uruguay, 1998), Cómo nacen los Ángeles[How Angels are Born] (Brasil, 1996), Sicario [Hitman] (Venezuela, 1994), among others (León 29).
only through video. As suggested by Kantaris and O’Bryen, popular productions started to be made in Latin America not in connection with populism or as a celebration of difference (2) but as “a weave and weft, the interlacing of submission and resistance, of contestation and complicity” (Martín Barbero qtd. in Kantaris and O’Bryen 6).
In Popayán, one of Colombia’s forgotten small cities, Nelson Fredy Osorio made Marcando Calavera (1999) [Scoring Skull], a film that could be classified as Cinema of Marginality since it portrays the world of youngsters living in the city’s periphery. But the film also has elements that place it as a popular culture production, such as its melodramatic narrative and the use of a digital camera 一a ¾. “That was the technology available to make films at that time in Popayán”, explained Osorio in 2016. He is self-taught in audiovisual production and comes from a popular background, which is why he understood the importance of including the perspective of the kids.
In the nineties, and also framed within popular uses of video technologies, appeared Cali-Sex, the first pornographic production company, run by Gustavo Castaño –who also directed the eight films the company did. In 1997 they started distributing their feature debut Lujuria en la Finca de mi amá[Lust in the Finca of my mom ] in sex-shops. It is an amateur film trying to show sex in a local context with the basic technology available; that newness and amateurism insufflate freedom to Gustavo Castaño’s films. Lust in the Finca of my mom starts with a long shot of the landscape of the Valle del Cauca from a moving car ーwhich Castaño will keep using in most of his films, making it a trademark of his work. The showing of the city and the landscape, the constant re-framing of Cali and the Valle, could have been influenced by the canonical porn film Deep Throat (1972), but it is also related to the cultural imaginary on Cali and Valle del Cauca’s relation to body culture and sexuality: beautiful objectified women, black
people with supposedly higher sexual inputs (being this area in Colombia inhabited by the second largest black population in South America), exposed bodies due to high temperatures, and usual recreational spots like the beach or rivers. The narrative in Cali-Sex films is framed by money, which in a way depicts the cultural change the city lived after the emergence of the Cali Cartel. Characters access or give sex in an exchange of money at luxurious houses of Ciudad Jardín or El Ingenio, neighborhoods constructed by the narcos . “Pornography’s allegories of 14 transgression reveal, in the most visceral way, not only our culture’s edges, but how intricately our own identities are bound up in all of these quite unspoken but relentless cultural dictates” (Kipnis 167).
The readings we can make of Colombian society through the films of Gustavo Castaño are important and remain in the denied and obscure area of the otherness that a large part of the country doesn’t want to see. Even Castaño is reluctant to talk about his films nowadays . 15
14 InLos Visitadores (2000), for example, we see a fincalent to Castaño by a narco who’s condition for using the place as a location was that his pet appeared in the film. This is why we see a monkey in between sex scenes.
15 Castaño’s filmography shows an evolution from very amateur pornography that is looking for its own aesthetic and narrative in the 1990s, into a more mainstream one, probably related to the more extensive distribution of porn through the Internet during the 2000s. Colombia keeps producing pornography, not features as those Castaño did, but through websites as culioneros.com is possible to see the contemporary pornographic production of the country, where porn actresses as Esperanza Gómez and others reinforce the image of latinas as objects of desire.
Un Largo y Ardiente Paseo (1998) by Gustavo Castaño. Retrieved from
https://revistavisaje.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/jefe-besa-pierna-640x360.png on June 27 2019
Accessing Cali-Sex films is possible thanks to Ventana Indiscreta [Rear Window], a video-store in Cali where all eight productions of Cali-Sex are available. Places like this played an important role in cinema culture since the 1990s, both in Colombia and many other countries where cinema theaters depend on the limited offer of local distributors, and the prices of tickets are quite expensive for a large part of the population.
Piracy transformed the access to cinema as it made possible for films as Marcando Calavera and Cali-Sex’s productions ーthat did not have a place at the official venues of cinema theaters, festivals, and legal distributionー to find an audience. Latin American films under the Cinema of Marginality have remained very popular at piracy shops in the streets, where it’s still common to see titles from the 1990s on sale. Piracy is in a way an alternative venue where popular taste of Latin American audiences can be read.
Pluralization of Discourses. A new cinema in the XXI Century
Since the 2000s, Colombia has been producing a larger number of films and TV series shown at international venues, TV channels, and online platforms. The transnationality of Colombian cinema nowadays16 is similar to the one experienced by countries that didn’t have proper cinema industries. A more interconnected world, renovation in cinema laws, and technological developments have facilitated the creation of a transnational interchange (Suárez 180-182).
Cinema production in Colombia has become more stable and is less of an economic adventure because of the 2003 Law on Filmmaking. It has also gained a variety of voices, perspectives, and venues for exhibition and distribution thanks to the possibilities opened by digital technologies.
The new cinema law created in 2003 and modified in 2012 set in place a more organized way for financing and protecting local cinema production. After the experiences with the Surcharge law and FOCINE the government understood that supporting cinema was not only a manner of giving money or credits to filmmakers and producers but to act as a producer itself. Consistent monitoring of how the budget given to a film was being used, setting more strict mechanisms for collecting exhibitors’ taxes, and having a committee of cinema professionals to select the juries and the director of the national cinema fund ーFondo de Desarrollo Cinematográfico (FDC), entity in charge of managing the lawー, are some of the main outputs (Acosta 28-33).
16 As stated by Súarez transnationality in Colombian cinema has always been present since its beginnings, when Italians as Di Domenico Brothers did the first fictional films, or during the 1960s the work of José María Arzuaga (181). But also co-productions have existed since the 1940s, for example,
In the 2003 version of the Law on Filmmaking the promotion of the “good image” of the country was limited to co-productions, but in the 2012 reform it was removed altogether. As stated by Lisandro Duque, filmmaker and director of the ACACC ー Colombian Academy of Cinematography Arts and Sciencesー in that same year, “the Law, with those limits, would attract nobody” (Backstage and Post-scene of Cinema Legislation in Colombia 28).
The image of violence became an import-good, and one of the main ones to attract international capitals. For example, since 2006 Colombian TV channels have been producing, one after the other, series with stories related to drug trafficking. Those series started to be widely sold to different Latin American channels, and now large corporations as FOX and Netflix have been co-producing this kind of audiovisual products in the country.
Violence in Colombia is what films show persistently at international venues. 17 Filmmakers that leave behind the political cinema from the 1970s and the depiction of the abject subject from the 1980s and 90s, to explore the wide array of aesthetic and narrative possibilities they came across through piracy or cine-clubs . Colombian contemporary filmmakers present at18 international festivals come from a generation that got to cinema through education (nationally or abroad), and have only known the country immersed in conflict. This is one of the reasons
17 For example, The Netherlands we could see in 2018 IDFA Our Song to War, a short film about the Bojayá Massacre, or in Rotterdam International Film Festival 2019, Birds of Passage, about the “bonanza marimbera” in Guajira during the 1970s, and Pirotecnia about the falsos positivos.
18Cine-clubs have been fundamental in Colombian cinephilia since the 1970s, forming also the cinematic aesthetics and narratives of many filmmakers. In Cali, for example, is notorious the relation between the films screened at the cine-club of the art foundationlugar a dudas since 2008 and the movies made by
local filmmakers that worked at this cine-club as César Acevedo or Oscar Ruíz Navia. Both have participated at venues as Locarno, Rotterdam, or Cannes where Acevedo even got the Palm d’Or in 2015.
why their films show systemic violence reproduced in daily life, often as a representation of experiences they lived themselves.
As stated by Suárez: “The ubiquitous presence of violence, a subject that has defined the history of Colombia and its cinema and research on the topic, now plays a determining role in its possibilities for incorporating in the global scene” (180).
The popular and grass-roots video productions made without an intellectual or artistic cinema education that began emerging during the 1990s grew in number and developed significantly during the 2000s. These productions were made with digital cameras and home-editing software, used community halls, streets, and the Internet as exhibition venues and video stalls at the street markets as a channel for distribution; in short, they have managed to exist in almost complete independence from official cinema circuits.
Grass-roots audiovisual production in Colombia has been widely analyzed (Aguilera and Polanco 2011, Flores and Crawford 2002, Amador-Baquiro 2019, Rodríguez 2013, among others), and violence ーsystematic, political, urban and ruralー continues to be a transversal topic both in the films and the research on them. In the case of these productions ーmore related to video activismー, violence is not portrayed directly. What we often see is how a community reacts to acts of violence committed against them. As proposed by Aguilera and Polanco (2011) in their analysis of grass-roots video production in the South Pacific region of Colombia, they use the moving image within political processes in their communities. This means an audiovisual product is not a tool by itself but a part of a bigger process the community is carrying out (23). For example, the ACIN ーAsociación de Cabildos Indígenas del Norte del
Caucaー created the Tejido de Comunicaciones Indígena [Net of Indigenous Communication] 19 one of all the “Tejidos” [Nets] to fight against the “death project” . They recognized their 20 struggles for centuries since colonization and ーin consonance with the Zapatista movementー they see the role of indigenous communities nowadays in the preservation of nature and life (“project of life”). Within this project, video is considered a tool to communicate different activities inside and outside of the communities, creating memories of their struggles, or informing of attacks by different armed actors. Another crucial element in this video production is the creation of another image of the indigenous population, often associated with the guerrillas by the mass media. The power of self-representation entails a possibility for transforming dominant interpretative powers (Aguilera and Polanco, 31).
País de los pueblos sin dueños (2009) by Tejido de Comunicaciones Indígena. Retrieved from
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-hwXtTKcfr20/UEadDmZNZAI/AAAAAAAAJFQ/rvOfx_SVjZo/s1600/paisdelospueblossindue %C3%B1o3.jpg on June 27 2019
19 Marta Rodríguez has had a close working relationship with this indigenous organization. Her films with ACIN are co-directions, this means that we can date indigenous cinema production in the Cauca since the 1970s.
20 Other Tejidos are environment and economy, people and culture, justice and harmony, and life defense.
As the Tejido de Comunicaciones Indígena, there is also the Escuela de Comunicación Wayuú in Guajira, the North Caribbean region of the country. In cities such as Cali and Bogotá video collectives have created festivals as Ojo al Sancocho which has already celebrated eleven 21 versions, and the Festival de Cine y Video Comunitario of the Aguablanca District which has ten. These venues are very important to gather different grass-roots uses of video and to create nets in the sharing of political and social goals.
While grass-roots organizations have been supported by international organisms as OEA, UNESCO, among others, and their use of the moving image has been widely researched among social scientists, there’s a different scenario for some filmmakers that engage their communities and portray social struggles under more mainstream narrative traditions, and which have gained popularity through DVD’s piracy and online platforms. Even when they work close to the community ーengaging them as actors, technical crew, in the production of the narrative, and also as their audienceー, their work does not respond to political or resilience processes. Their films are actually quite violent, and occasionally go against the “peace actors” imaginary organizations such as the indigenous try to convey. Even though the violent stories in their films are related to their contexts of production and intend to moralize the community against war or drug trafficking, their circulation through DVD piracy and online platforms makes them also a part of the capitalistic flow. In the video stalls of the street markets they have gained popularity thanks to their use of mainstream narratives, and the promotion the sellers make through screening their most violent sequences. They found this way to penetrate an official market that
21Ojo al Sancocho created in 2016 their own cinema theater built up by the community in Ciudad Bolivar, Bogotá. In Cali, collectives as Cine Pal’ Barrio screen at the streets of peripheral neighborhoods the audiovisual productions made by the communities.
rejects them, reaching a large audience. For example, filmmakers as those from the Guapi Group ー Fernando Escobar, Alexis Ocoró, and Jefferson Paz ー come from a context of war22 between legal and illegal armed groups, drug traffic, and the extraction of gold. Their stories portray criminals, displaced peasants and battles for gold. La Gorra (2009), the most popular amateur national production distributed through piracy on the street markets, is the reenactment made by the community of Dos Quebradas, Risaralda, of a real war between two gangs in their barrio. These filmmakers have created their own production means and distribution venues, and have found an audience in its mixture of the violence experienced in first hand, the violence broadcasted on the television series, and probably in the also large portrayal of violence in Colombian and world-wide movies they can access through the internet or DVD piracy. As stated by Martín Barbero “the urban-popular and its transformation into the ‘mass’ becomes paradigmatic” (quoted by Kantaris and O’Bryen, 6), and when we add that these films play a role in the creation of memories and identities of violence in Colombia it becomes even more. What is the role of those images in the creation of memories and possible processes of mourning in the communities? How is the relationship between mass media and popular independent productions? Why are these films invisible to those people studying grass-roots video activism? Why are they also invisible in Colombian cinema history or an idea of national cinema? How can these films be placed in a cinema history marked by violence?
In the next chapter I intend to answer these questions by analyzing four of the digital films made by filmmakers coming from popular sectors, and distributed on street markets (specifically the
22This is a name I have created to refer to this group of filmmakers since they belong to the same town and work with similar strategies as those of cinema collectives. For example, they all have the chance to write and direct their films with support from the others.
streets in downtown Cali) during 2016. I will delve into their modes of production, distribution, and audience reception, as well as on the textual analysis of the films.
Chapter II
Representations of violence in four digital popular films
The films under investigation have to be framed as popular cultural productions made with the participation, collaboration, and co-creation of communities that have been subject to violence in Colombia. The filmmakers leading the process of the films are in some cases self-taught men, and in others educated in technological institutions, where their education is more practical than authorial or artistic. Their audiovisual projects start as a self-managed enterprise, with little or no budget, with a simple idea open to be developed and transformed by the community, and a digital camera handled by themselves or rotating between different members of the crew. Their visual education has occurred through mass media and mainstream cinema, a reason why they represent stories taken from the reality of their communities through those hegemonic narratives and aesthetics. Their practice is then a mix of local stories, characters, and places with global elements, mainly of those coming from hegemonic fronts such as Hollywood (action and gangster films, specifically) and TV series (narco genre and melodramas). Far from the rejection of western culture the New Latin American Cinemas from the 1970s had, these films tend to make use of global hegemonic narratives and aesthetics, mixed ーas in the cinemas that emerged in the crisis of the 1980s in the continent, which was explained in the previous chapter through León’s concept of Cinema of Marginalityー with local concerns such as the lack of
opportunities for young people coming from lower classes, drug trafficking and criminal nets, and violent and chaotic Latin American cities.
Hegemonic elements are one main shaping force in these productions, which not only come from big global capitalist forces, but also from local traditions that tend to be reproduced in these films, like patriarchal structures. As García Canclini suggests, new technologies not only promote creativity and innovation; they also reproduce known structures (432). Some of those known structures are the fetishization of violence by capitalism, and local persistent gender and racial representations.
The films have their community as their immediate audience 一the neighborhood, the town or small city where the film was made, and where people recognize themselves in those images. But the massive reproduction by piracy sellers and online platforms, their mainstream elements and hegemonic values have made them reach a larger audience. For example, people who buy copies of these films at the video stalls of the cities’ centers do it initially attracted by the fragment the seller screens, which are always the most violent scenes of the films. We can assume then an unexpected audience exists in relation to hegemonic structures such as fetichization of violence. But as many of the comments users post on online platforms that show the films suggest, there’s also a relation to concerns and life experiences across Colombia and23 other Latin American countries. As Okome proposes about Nollywood:
23 Comments as the following, made to the film La Gorra, make these shared concerns about violence visible: “La mejor peli y yo estoy en lo mismo” [the best film and I’m in the same situation] (posted by Junior Gamer, on August 2018), or “ Todo es ACI en las pandillas. Unos se van otros vienen nunca se
acaba yo viví eso en Venezuela Maracaibo gracias ha Dios sali deso (sic)” [Everything is like that in gangs. Some leave and others come, it is never over. I lived it in Venezuela, Maracaibo. Thanks to god I got out” (Posted by David Zaens, on August 2018).
The audience that I refer to is not constituted as an a priori category but by the semantics of the peculiar needs of the moment, which are always but loosely inspired by social and economic contingencies. In other words, the newly constituted audience exists, as it were, in a flexible geography of desire (Okome qtd. in Mistry and Ellapen 52).
These films need to be thought in relation to their local contexts and production processes, but also as globalized productions where a dispersed audience comes together according to hegemonic elements, social and economic contingencies similar to those represented in the films. In other words, these films should be read as contemporary popular culture in Latin America which, as suggested by Barbero, needs to be thought of as a “weave and weft, the interlacing of submission and resistance, of contestation and complicity” with hegemony” (M. Barbero qtd in Kantaris and O’Bryen 6).
Analyzing the next four digital productions as popular culture helps us understand their value within the communities they gather (locally and globally), and how they relate to issues such as violence. Or as Mistry and Ellapen propose about Nollywood, thinking these films as “anthropological devices” that can provide “‘unmediated’ traces or symptoms of instantaneous concerns in the communities in which they are made and to whom they cater” (52). In that order of ideas, these films can help us understand how contemporary Colombian cinema has continued the narration of violence ーnowadays with the inclusion of voices that come from popular classes which allow readings on how violence has transformed that large sector of Colombian society.
