ABSTRACT
The cinematography of a number of Latin American countries over the last couple of decades has become deeply imbricated with the violent effects and aftershocks of a set of global forces which have profoundly restructured the social relations of the polis. These forces are often represented in cinema as the flipside of glossy corporate globalization or the inevitable corollary of ‘wild’ (unregulated) neoliberal capitalism, a ‘negative globalization’ of the type analysed by Manuel Castells in the third volume of his trilogy on the Information Age, End of Millennium (1998). This is the negative globalization of poverty and social exclusion in the ‘globally connected but locally disconnected’ megalopolis (Castells 1996: 404), but it is also the globalization of crime via the hugely profitable illegal drugs industry which has so profoundly marked many Latin American societies, particularly in the two countries which furnish the films to be analysed here in detail: Colombia and Brazil. My focus will be on the processes of representation which link these raw social conditions to a broader social imaginary, for which I take cinema, caught as it is today between a largely national literary culture and a globalized televisual culture, to be a paradigmatic case. Of course, no study of cultural forms in Latin America can afford to remain on the terrain of narrow aesthetic debate given the traditional imbrication of social and political power with the ‘lettered city’ in Latin America (Rama 1984; Franco 2002). But the relationship of the local to the global is not only a matter of economics; it is also a relationship that is profoundly mediated by social and increasingly global imaginaries of which televisual culture still takes pride of place despite the internet boom. Hence we should not forget that representational processes do not merely reflect social processes but are largely constitutive of deterritorializing forces, a point I shall be making in more detail later.
