ABSTRACT
This essay explores Santiago Alvarez's iconic, montage-style filmmaking as it prefigured Modernity's accelerated crisis as produced by transnational capitalism and theorized years later by poststructuralists and postmodernists. Alvarez, one of the fathers of New Latin American Cinema, stands as an ever more relevant mentor for many contemporary young filmmakers in terms of his lessons about audience cultivation and politicized, immediate, innovative image-making in a context of what he termed 'accelerated underdevelopment'. His aesthetic of limited resources and limited time and his early emphasis on the tactless camera eye has become a veritable weapon for change for many filmmakers in Latin America's latest decade, which saw successive economic crises, the failure of neoliberal policies, and a rise in left wing governments.
