PHILOSOPHY; HISTORY; POLITICS; CULTURAL STUDIES; LATIN AMERICA

Vol. 4 No. 2 (2020): Sección Estudios de la Cultura. Cine en América Latina: dinámicas de un intercambio histórico.
Dossier

Cidade de Deus, Babel, and También la lluvia. Towards a Global Film Language

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  • Maude Havenne
Maude Havenne
Georgetown University
DOI: https://doi.org/10.59999/4.2.1162

Published 2021-01-10

Keywords

  • Cine iberoamericano contemporáneo,
  • Globalización,
  • Descolonización de la cultura
  • Contemporary Ibero-American cinema,
  • Globalization,
  • Decolonization of culture

How to Cite

Havenne, M. (2021). Cidade de Deus, Babel, and También la lluvia. Towards a Global Film Language. ENCUENTROS LATINOAMERICANOS (Segunda Época) ENCLAT ISSN 1688-437X, 4(2), 239–257. https://doi.org/10.59999/4.2.1162

Copyright (c) 2021 Maude Havenne

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Abstract

After decades of struggle against Western hegemony, the success of Third World cinema both from critics and at the box-office attests to a change in the center vs. periphery scheme of cinematic productions worldwide. The case of Ibero-American movies especially, with productions such as Cidade de Deus (Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, 2003), Babel (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2006) and También la lluvia (Icíar Bollaín, 2010) provides an alternative to David Bordwell’s confident statement in 1985 that “no absolute pure alternative to Hollywood exists” (Bordwell, 1985, p. 624). Building on recent film scholars’ paradigms of a post-classical and more global cinema (such as Deborah Shaw, 2007 and Eleftheria Thanouli, 2009), this essay offers a close-reading of these three contemporary Ibero-American movies in terms of their similarities from a production, distribution, as well as aesthetic perspective. Through an analysis of shared collaborative strategies and patterns of creation (narratives in “network”, preferences for multiple languages, shooting locations, and protagonists, etc.), the following article argues for a general intent both from Hispanic and Lusophone productions to fight alongside instead of against other cinematic currents in a joint effort to gather strength against multinational exploitation, inequality, exclusion, and other negative consequences of globalization.

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