ABSTRACT
Latin American film studies has constituted itself as a field primarily through the analysis of film as an art form and as an industrial practice. Aesthetic and industrial analyses have been the principle critical approaches: the former taking aim at the workings of film form, the latter at the changing structures and dynamics of filmmaking practices. This chapter explores the scope of Latin American film studies by accounting for film/video's interface with other media, from community radio, to television, to digital technologies. It also helps us to reassess film history in the region by utilizing the discussion of contemporary indigenous and collaborative media activism to help us reassess the relationship between film and political militancy— an interface long defined by the New Latin American Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. The chapter reviews some of the enormous variety of collaborative activist film- and video-making emerging with the advent of digital recording and editing possibilities.
