ABSTRACT
Latin American exploitation cinema has a rich heritage spanning many decades and many genres. It reaches back to the gangster fi lms Juan Orol made in Mexico in the 1950s (El sindicato del crimen/Crime Syndicate, 1954),1 to the Argentinean ‘sexploits’ of Armando Bó and Isabel Sarli from the 1950s through the 1970s (El trueno entre las hojas/Thunder Among the Leaves, 1957, Fiebre/Fever 1970), and to the Mexican narcofronteriza videos of the 1980s and 1990s. And yet this is a cinema that has been starved until recently of critical attention with most major continental and national histories, at worst ignoring and at best offering a few derisory comments on various exploitation cinemas. Initial work in this nascent research area by the editors (2004) and others (Syder and Tierney, 2005; Alemán, 2004) has rehearsed the reasons for such a lack of critical attention suggesting that, for a critical elite (those who historically defi ne the parameters of national culture) anxious to emphasize the prestige of their own national cinema, these often badly made, ‘low’-culture genre fi lms (fantasy, horror, wrestling, sexploitation, gore) provide little cultural capital. This work has also suggested that, for the same arbiters of national culture, the hybridity of these fi lms (i.e., genre borrowings from Hollywood and recut, redubbed English-language versions) can seem problematic with respect to postcolonialist discourses (which seek to emphasize the function and viability of a nationalist cinema in the face of the aesthetic, economic, and ideological hegemony of the Hollywood industry) and subsequently threaten national artistic autonomy (Syder and Tierney, 2005: 38-39). And fi nally, this work has argued that critics eschew exploitation cinema because-with their exaggerated plots and liberal doses of mysticism, fantasy, sex, and gorethese cinemas threaten to frame Latin American cinema through colonialist stereotypes of the weird, the wonderful, and the ‘savage.’ Hence, most accounts of Latin American cinema, which seek to dignify its production, either omit exploitation cinema altogether or denigrate it as the product of periods of artistic and industrial decline.2 Stephanie Dennison and Lisa Shaw’s recent Popular Cinema in Brazil is exceptional as a survey of a Latin American national cinema in that it does devote at least a few pages
both to horror auteur José Mojica Marins and to the pornochancha fi lms that proliferated in the 1970s and 1980s (2004: 140-43, 149-78).
