Screen Culture in the Global South

Cinema at the End of the World

Antonio Traverso, Deane Williams, Keyan G. Tomaselli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000075885
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This volume adopts a transversal South-South approach to the study of visual culture in transnational, transcultural, and geopolitical contexts.

Every day hundreds of people travel back and forth between southern countries, including Australia, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, New Zealand, Indonesia, Timor-Leste, and South Africa. With these people travel cultures, experiences, memories, and images. This creates the conditions for the generation, sharing, and circulation of new knowledge that is both southern and about the South as a specific kind of material and imaginary territory (or territories). It does so through the study of the southern hemisphere's screen cultures, addressing the broad spectrum of cultural expression in both traditional and new screen media, including film, television, video, digital, interactive, and online and portable technologies.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Arts.

INTRODUCTION: CINEMA AT THE END OF THE WORLD

Antonio Traverso Deane Williams
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7501-2052

At the Southern Screens symposium—convened by Antonio Traverso at Curtin University, Perth, Australia, in October 2013, and subsequently documented in Critical Arts 29 (5) (2015)—it was decided that the symposium should be followed up with a broader conference. In November 2015, a collection of scholars from across the southern hemisphere, and some from the north whose interests are southern, gathered at Monash University, Melbourne, for the inaugural Cinema at the End of the World conference.¹ With the Republic of South Africa, Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, the USA, and the UK all represented, the conference proved wildly diverse in terms of topics and approaches, as well as sharing a common sense of camaraderie in one of the southernmost cities in the world.

It was Chilean media academic and screen writer/producer Roberto Trejo who first suggested the title “El Cine del Fin del Mundo” (“Cinema of the End of the World”) when the idea of an international conference of this kind was being considered in Chile, around 2010. Trejo’s suggestion didn’t arise out of a vacuum, but drew on the well-established identity culture of the Southern Cone, particularly recognisable in the Patagonian region across southern Argentina and Chile. Indeed, in the southern Argentine region of Tierra del Fuego, the most diverse things are named after this imaginary of the extreme: there one can ride the historic Tren del Fin del Mundo (end-of-the-world train) from Ushuaia to the Tierra del Fuego National Park, read the Diario del Fin del Mundo (end-of-the-world newspaper), and even spend an evening listening to the Coro del Fin del Mundo (end-of-the-world choir). Similarly, one can appreciate artworks such as Argentine photographer Nicolás Janowski’s 2017 multimedia project entitled Adrift in Blue (www.adriftinblue.com). In his piece, which involves archival and digital photography, poetry, and sound, and which is expressed through an interactive online work, a visual book, and an itinerant exhibition, Janowski interrogates the visual history of Tierra del Fuego. In one section of this work, Janowski realises a painterly and photographic intervention of some of the more than one thousand photographs that were taken in Tierra del Fuego between 1918 and 1924 by Austrian ethnologist and missionary priest Martin Gusinde (1886–1969), in which the latter sought to recreate the ancient tribal life of displaced Selk’nam, Kawésqar, and Yámana communities (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Nicolás Janowski, Adrift in Blue (2017). www.adriftinblud.com/. Argentina.

Considering such a vibrant southern imaginary, the denomination “Cinema at the End of the World” can be understood in various interrelated ways. Firstly, it alludes to the material conditions of cinematic culture emerging in the world’s most remote locations, including film production, screenings, and implausibly located cinema houses, such as Cine Packewaia in the Argentine port of Ushuaia, the world’s southernmost city, popularly referred to as “el Fin del Mundo”, located at 54 degrees south on the shore of the Beagle Channel and 1 000 km from Antarctica across the Southern Ocean. In spite of its small size and extremely remote location, Cine Packewaia has regular daily screenings of the latest Hollywood blockbusters as well as arthouse movies, and it regularly hosts alternative film and art events.

Unsurprisingly, the phrase “cine del fin del mundo” is also used in Argentina to refer to films produced in the province of Tierra del Fuego, as the digital newspaper Tiempo Sur did when it recently reported a screening event of the work of fueguino film-makers (Tiempo Sur 2017). Among the films was Lucía Vassallo’s La cárcel del fin del mundo (Gaol at the end of the world, Argentina, 2013) (see Figure 2), an historical documentary that relates the origins of the gaol of Ushuaia in the early 1930s, verifying how the world’s southernmost city was in fact born out of a penal colony to which, as popular wisdom had it, prisoners were taken on a trip of no return.

Figure 2: Publicity poster for La cárcel del fin del mundo (dir. Lucía Vassallo, 2013, Argentina)

Meanwhile, only a few kilometres southeast and on the opposite side of the Beagle Channel, which marks the border between Argentina and Chile, lies Puerto Williams, the world’s southernmost village and naval base. Puerto Williams was the location for ARCA (Artistas en Residencia Cabo de Hornos, or Cape Horn Artists in Residence) between June and July 2017. Selected out of a national call for applications, 15 emergent Chilean film-makers with documentary projects at various stages of development spent two weeks at the Reserva de la Biosfera Cabo de Hornos (Cape Horn biosphere reserve), Navarino Island, Puerto Williams, working on their films under the guidance of renowned Chilean film professionals, including documentarians Bettina Perut and Iván Osnovikoff. Among the selected ARCA projects are two that directly focus on the contemporary experience of Tierra del Fuego’s indigenous people. Puerto Williams resident Alberto Serrano’s in-progress documentary Limítrofe (Borderline) (see Figure 3) considers the armed clash over national borders across the Beagle Channel between the dictators of Chile and Argentina, Generals Pinochet and Videla, in the 1970s, and its enduring effects on the surviving members of the local Yagan community. Kawuiche, an in-progress documentary by Gustavo Agurto, a resident of the nearby Chilean city of Punta Arenas, focuses on one indigenous man’s daily struggle, along with his family, to survive in this unforgiving region of the world (see Figure 4).

Figure 3: Alberto Serrano, Limítrofe. Documentary film in progress. Chile. Screengrab: www.arcaresidencia.com

Figure 4: Gustavo Agurto, Kawuiche. Documentary film in progress. Chile. Screengrab: www.arcaresidencia.com

The innovative, independent cinemas of the “end of the world”—by which we mean not only the cinemas of southern hemisphere nations, even though we have selected mostly examples from Argentina and Chile for this introduction, but the cinemas of the Global South—have generated a growing number of autonomous, transversal film festivals and online screen culture and screen production platforms around the world. Among these we can highlight:

• the Colectivo Observatorio Sur (Observatory South Collective), a transnational network of interdisciplinary screen research, production, and exhibition founded in 2003, with members in Buenos Aires and Barcelona, which focuses on screen artefacts, cultures, genres, and approaches unaccounted for in mainstream audiovisual circuits

• the End of the World International Film Festival, held for the first time in Ushuaia in 2008

• the International Antarctic Film Festival of the Environment and Sustainability, which was launched in 2012 in Punta Arenas, Chile, and which in its 2016 iteration also included screenings in the southernmost locations of Puerto Natales and Puerto Williams

• the Cines del Sur (Cinemas of the South) International Film Festival, whose 10th version was held in Granada, Spain, in June 2017, continuing its activist focus on emerging cinemas and film-makers of the Global South

• the Mirada Sur (Southern Gaze) network, established in Chile in 2016 to gather together some of the most innovative screen production companies emerging in recent years, with the sole common objective of promoting the distribution and exhibition of local screen work abroad (“local stories for global audiences” is their motto)

• the inaugural edition of FICSUR, the International Film Festival of Nations from the World’s South, held in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in July 2017.

The above initiatives clearly evoke the sense of a cinematic culture invested in theoretical projects increasingly identified with such concepts as “southern theory” (Connell 2007; Connell 2013), “south of the West”² (Gibson 1992), “epistemologies of the South” (Santos 2007; Santos 2012), “aesthetics of decolonisation” (Mignolo 2005; Mignolo and Gómez 2012), and “decolonising pedagogies” (Palermo 2014; Palermo 2015), as some of these were considered in the introduction to the 2015 Southern Screens special issue of Critical Arts (Traverso 2015). It is important to avoid the temptation of announcing yet another turn in theory, namely a “southern turn”, as such a homogenising declaration would deplete the decolonising potential of the creative and critical endeavours considered here. However, it is undeniable that for some time now there has been a growing interest in these concepts and theories, as well as their critical applications to areas of creative practice, such as cinema. This broadening interest has become increasingly recognisable in the myriad seminars, conferences, and publications, and in the 2007 founding of a full journal, The Global South, which, not unlike this collection of essays, seeks to focus on cultural expression from “those parts of the world that have experienced the most political, social, and economic upheaval and have suffered the brunt of the greatest challenges facing the world under globalization” (Indiana University Press, n.d.).

There is also, however, an undeniable apocalyptic sense invested in the phrase “cinema at/of the end of the world”, which we seek to address here in terms of the critical and transformative vitality involved in the Global South’s project of decolonisation rather than the purely dystopic anxieties mobilised by the Western imaginary of world endings. As Mick Broderick (2015, 609) puts it, the “Western apocalyptic imaginary” is ideologically inseparable from European narratives of travel, discovery, and conquest and the “corresponding acts of genocidal appropriation and negation” that the former have elicited. Thus, in entitling the present collection as “Cinema at the End of the World” we seek to prefigure a critical footing for cinematic culture and all kinds of creative practice from and for the Global South in the face of hegemonic Western eschatological traditions and discourses, invoking in this way the paramount role that cinematic representation, reflection, and imagining are to play in the context of the ominous challenges that human societies face in the twenty-first century.

“To think the end of the world; what other worlds are possible?” was indeed the key theme of the 1st Biennale of Art of the End of the World, an Argentine–Brazilian initiative in response to the International Polar Year, which was held in Ushuaia between March and April 2007. This biennale gathered together artists and artworks from 26 countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Canada. Tellingly, the event’s media release stated that “the first Biennale of Art of the End of the World proposes to connect the North and South Poles through art and technology, building a bridge between the inhabited peripheral zones of the planet near the Arctic and Antarctica” (UiU n.d.; author’s own translation).

Like the artists participating in the Bien...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Cinema at the End of the World
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Index