Postnational Cinema in Argentina, Mexico and Brazil (1990-2018). Between Fragmentation and Refiguration

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Christian Wehr
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 433326793

In Mexico, Argentina and Brazil, the three great cinematic nations of Latin America, cinema has been an important medium for the construction of collective identities. Mostly subsidised by the state, it made its audience familiar with discourses focusing on identity and concepts of national history. In Mexico the ideals of the revolution and the dissolution of an ethnic heterogeneity within a culture of mestizaje, in Argentina Peronism with its singular synthesis of syndicalism and populism and in Brazil a programme of homogenisation of ethnic diversity that above all was based on popular culture. The social, ethnic and cultural plurality in the above-mentioned countries was forcefully reduced by centralistic, authoritarian and sometimes dictatorial regimes for more than half a century. From the late 1980’s on, these political concepts of identity propagated strongly by the film industry began to erode. Seen from outside, this was a result of neo-liberal economic policies that successively integrated national spaces into global dynamics and opened them from within through processes of ethnic, social and cultural fragmentation. Both levels influence and strengthen each other reciprocally under the pressure of globalisation while the formerly suppressed plurality claims its right of existence with an increasingly vehement articulation of particular identities - a plurality that is based on ethnic, social and also political and religious traditions. The long lasting destabilisation of uniform national discourses is reflected by a medium that was significantly involved in the former construction of collective identities: cinema. Film not only focuses on the dissolution and subversion of dated models of nation-building. Simultaneously it becomes a multifaceted field for the construction and articulation of new, independent and particular identities located in between rural peripheries and urban subculture. This emergence of decentralised communities takes place under and outside of the influence of uniform government programmes. It defines its own norms as well as alternative ethnical and social concepts and even creates a part of its own jurisdiction, as is documented impressively in numerous cinematic apologies of vigilantism. This project focuses on the cinematographic staging of this process that accompanies the erosion of nationalistic discourses and the construction of periphery and particular identities. The manifold cinematic interpretations of this double-sided, subversive and at the same time constructive dynamics will be analysed in the case of the above-mentioned three countries using a sociological perspective based on cultural semiotics and film studies.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants